  In this paper, we investigate the brain activity elicited during perception
of animated shapes as stimuli, which have been found to evoke mental state
attributions. Contrary to a previous study, we incorporated the participants'
responses in the analysis, and observed robust activations in mPFC, which has
been found to play an important role in understanding other's and one's own
nature. From our analyses, TPOj was observed showing robust activation during
the task as well as functionally connected to AA and LTC, which lead to
speculation that empathy might co-occur with mentalizing in the task and that
humans might be able to empathize with these interacting shapes, in spite of
lacking human features. Along with this, in one of our analyses, we were able
to localize a region close to the pSTS, where the activation depicted the
participants' 'ability to mentalize'. Based on our observations, we modelled
the prediction of mentalization and propose our model as an approach towards
developing a brain-activity based model to detect ToM (Theory of Mind)
difficulties, which could be useful in research about disorders like Autism
Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as well as assessment of mentalization-based
treatments. Additionally, we use our findings to reiterate how the Resting
State might not always act as a good control condition and that control
conditions should be task-specific.
