论文部分内容阅读
Deception is considered a social behavior in which one person attempts to persuade another to accept as true what the deceiver believes to be untrue.From the neural perspective, lying is a complex cognitive process.As a number of recent studies have shown sex differences in various cognitive tasks, it is likely to be influenced by sex.We studied the effect of sex on deceptive behaviors and their neural correlates using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) method.Twenty-nine fight-handed volunteers (15 female and 14 male) participated in the study.They were told either to lie or to tell the truth while answering questions from a questionnaire focusing on their personal information.There were no behavioral differences between the two groups.Both men and women made more errors and had longer reaction times (RTs) when lying than when telling the truth.The "lie > truth" direct contrast comparison of the BOLD signal revealed activation in a number of structures including areas of the inferior frontal cortex, insula, thalamus, caudate nucleus and cerebellum, supporting the complex cognitive structure of deception.Males showed much broader activations mainly in the prefrontal regions.Direct contrasts of activations in male and female subjects revealed higher signal intensities in males compared to females in the area of the left middle frontal gyrus (MFG).Based on the idea that the amount of neural activity depends on the computational demand imposed by the task, greater intensity of the left MFG activation in men can be considered as indicative of a greater effort and may suggest that mechanisms of selecting relevant information in the pursuit of a higher behavioral goal are less efficient in men.