associate an unfamiliar face with a familiar category more readily. while recognizing that this is the first study that has looked into this connection, the authors propose that it has potential to lead into further research about regulating the tpj with vasopressin or a similar compound, which could allow pharmacologists to target this area of the brain and help with certain disorders including autism, social anxiety disorder. perhaps such an approach could also be used to treat certain symptoms of schizophrenia or other disorders with know social cognitive impairments. current research current research involving the tpj is extensive, ranging from issues of physiology to issues of mental state. a wide range of cognitive processes rely on the tpj and as such gaining information about it is crucial. research is conducted by studying the role tpj plays both with and without lesions when stimulated, and with task-based fmri. research concerns various issues such as theory of mind, out-of-body experiences, temporal order judgments, morality, etc. this is a growing field due to the prevalence of ailments that involve tpj as well as because of the importance of perception in everyday life. theory of mind theory of mind requires the collaboration of functionally related regions of the brain to form the distinction between self and other mental states and to create a comprehensive understanding of those mental states so that we may recognize, understand, and predict behavior. in general the theory of mind process is mediated by the dopaminergic-serotonergic system, which involves the tpj as well as other associative regions necessary for mentalizing. recent studies suggest that both the left tpj, working in conjunction with the frontal cortex, and the right tpj are involved in the representation of mental states; furthermore they suggest that the tpj is particularly active in making the distinction between the mental states of self and others. a study in nature neuroscience from 2004 describes how the tpj is involved in processing socially relevant cues including gaze direction and goal-directed action and also explains that results from the study show that lesions to this area of the brain result in an impaired ability to detect another persons belief. moreover, studies have reported an increase in activity in the tpj when patients are absorbing information through reading or images regarding other peoples' beliefs but not while observing information about physical control stimuli. some studies, however, have shown that the tpj, along with the cingulate cortex, is more specifically involved with attributing beliefs, but the process of mentalizing more generally is associated more with the medial prefrontal cortex. another study in current biology from 2012 identifies the importance of the tpj in both low-level, such as simple discrimination, and high-level, such as the ability to empathize, sociocognitive operations. in july 2011, a review from neuropsychologia presented a model of the mentalizing network that established that mental states are first detected in the tpj. the tpj is composed of two discrete anatomical regions, the inferior parietal lobule (ipl) and the caudal parts of the superior temporal sulcus (psts), and both are active in the process of distinction between mental states of different individuals; thus, it is probable that this detection is the outcome of the combination and coordination of these two parts. additionally, the right tpj is involved in the ventral attention stream and contributes to the ability to focus attention on a particular stimuli or objective. it has also been observed that the interaction and communication between the dorsal and ventral streams involves the tpj. out-of-body experiences the tpj is also a crucial structure for self-processing. several neuro-imaging studies have shown an activation of the tpj during different aspects of self-processing such as visuo-spatial perspective, self-other distinction, mental own body imagery, and vestibular and multi sensory integration. damage in the tpj has been linked to out-of-body experiences (obes), the feeling that one's self is located outside one's physical body. an obe is defined by the presence of three characteristics: disembodiment, the impression of seeing the world from a distant and elevated visuo-spatial perspective, and the impression of seeing one's own body from this elevated perspective. obes mostly occur to people with epilepsy or migraines, but approximately 10% of the healthy population also experience obes once or twice in a lifetime. they usually occur spontaneously and are of short duration, making obes hard to study. here is an example of a patient describing what he or she experienced during an obe: “i was in bed and about to fall asleep when i had the distinct impression that 'i' was at the ceiling level looking down at my body in the bed. i was very startled and frightened; immediately i felt that, i was consciously back in the bed again.” it is suggested that obes are caused by multi-sensory disintegration in the tpj disrupting different aspects of self-processing such as illusory reduplication, illusory self-location, and illusory perspective. the brain integrates different sensory inputs to create a representation of one's body and its location in its surrounding. some inhibition of discrepant inputs is required to have coherency, but in some cases, those discrepant inputs are so strong and come from more than one sensory source that it leads to two different representations of one's own body. this multi-sensory disintegration at the tpj leads to obes. an electromagnetic stimulation to the right tpj of an patient with epilepsy induced an obe. the author also states that these experiences are closely related to schizophrenia and phantom limb. temporal order judgement temporal order is the arrangement of events in time. by judging this, one can understand how we process things. temporal order judgments require an individual to determine the relative timing between two spatially separate events. one study revealed that subjects had to determine the order of appearance of two objects as well as which object fit a certain property better. what was learned from this study was that when identifying the order or appearance, fmri studies showed that there was bilateral activation of the tpj. meanwhile, when it comes to object characterization based on a property, it was noticed that there was only activation of the ltpj. as such, it is evident that tpj is involved in the “when” pathway of the brain. morality part of judging how virtuous an action was, whether someone is an ethical person or what one ought to do, morality usually (among other considerations) differentiates by actor intention. this applies to self-assessment as well as of others. connections made at the tpj help an individual understand their emotions: the tpj allows association of emotions with events or individuals, aiding in any related decision-making process. studies also show a relation between theory of mind and moral judgment, which further implicates the rtpj in morality cognition. however, errors in this emotional processing can arise when patients have lesions in the tpj or when the brain is electrically stimulated. transcranial magnetic stimulation (tms) to the rtpj seems to affect the ability of an individual, when they make moral decisions, to consider actors’ mental states. patients’ general ability to judge moral scenarios was not obviously impaired, but it did seem to specifically affect how much they integrated a protagonist's belief into the judgement—only affecting the judgement of a scenario in which the protagonist explicitly intends and so deliberately acts to cause significant harm but completely fails solely due to an incorrect belief (about tool/weapon used). tms can be used to disrupt neural activity in the rtpj just before a patient was to make a moral decision or during that decision-making process—constituting two different testing environments, but experimental results were unaffected.