Potential for the Medial Prefrontal Cortex to link Mentalizing and Attachment Schemas.

Abstract

Mentalizing-the process of thinking about others' and one's own thoughts and feelings-is ubiquitous and consequential. Traditionally, researchers have examined how the brain supports mentalizing. Here, we ask what content knowledge the brain relies on to mentalize. Based on converging evidence from developmental, cognitive, and social-affective neurosciences, we suggest that the socio-affective knowledge gained from early attachment relationships provide the basis for such content knowledge. Moreover, we suggest that this attachment relationship-generated schematized knowledge is represented in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and accessed during mentalizing. In this paper, we (1) describe mPFC activity during early caregiving experiences to demonstrate its encoding of the affective meaning of parent-child interaction episodes; (2) extrapolate from research on memory consolidation in the cognitive neurosciences to propose how regularities across parent-child interactions become abstracted into an attachment schema in the mPFC; (3) discuss the functionality of mPFC-coordinated representations of attachment schemas for predicting the social world. Long recognized by attachment theory, our integrative perspective prompts researchers to neuroscientifically examine whether the social relationship with one's caregiver builds attachment knowledge that in turns forms the basis for mentalizing.