The role of the right temporoparietal junction in the control of imitation

Controlling neural representations of the self and other people is fun-damental to social cognition. Brain imaging studies have implicated the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) in this ability, but causal evidence for its role is lacking. A debate is also ongoing regarding whether the control of, or switching between, self and other rep-resentations is a specialized or domain-general process: the rTPJ’s well-established role in reorienting attention supports a domain-general process, but a role specific to social cognition has also been proposed. Neuronavigated repetitive transcranial magnetic stimu-lation was used to target the rTPJ (and a control mid-occipital site) during a task requiring participants to switch between represen-tations of others ’ actions on both a social and a nonsocial level, by manipulating imitative and spatial compatibility simultaneously and independently. Both imitative and spatial compatibility effects were apparent on response times; however, the effect of imitative compat-ibility was significantly stronger, indicating less control of imitation, during stimulation of the rTPJ relative to the control site. This suggests that the rTPJ is involved in switching between self and other representations, and further, that this process may not be en-tirely domain general