Neural signatures of social inferences predict the number of real-life social contacts and autism severity.

We regularly infer other people's thoughts and feelings from observing their actions, but how this ability contributes to successful social behavior and interactions remains unknown. We show that neural activation patterns during social inferences obtained in the laboratory predict the number of social contacts in the real world, as measured by the social network index, in three neurotypical samples (total n = 126) and one sample of autistic adults (n = 23). We also show that brain patterns during social inference generalize across individuals in these groups.

A new look at domain specificity: insights from social neuroscience.

The concept of domain specificity - which suggests that some aspects of neural processing are specialized for particular types of stimuli - has been invoked to explain a range of cognitive phenomena, including language, face perception and theory of mind, and has been a hallmark of theories of cognitive architecture. More recent usage of this concept draws on neuroscientific data and, in particular, on work in social neuroscience. A critical examination of the part that the concept of domain specificity has played in theories of human brain function leads us to suggest a new view according to which domain specificity pertains to centrally generated constraints on information processing that can be both dynamic and context sensitive.

The neuroscience of understanding the emotions of others.

We cannot help but impute emotions to the behaviors of others, and constantly infer not only what others are feeling, but also why they feel that way. The comprehension of other people's emotional states is computationally complex and difficult, requiring the flexible, context-sensitive deployment of cognitive operations that encompass rapid orienting to, and recognition of, emotionally salient cues; classification of emotions into culturally-learned categories; and using an abstract theory of mind to reason about what caused the emotion, what future actions the person might be planning, and what we should do next in response. This review summarizes what neuroscience data - primarily functional neuroimaging data - has so far taught us about the cognitive architecture enabling emotion understanding in its various forms.

The neural basis of understanding the expression of the emotions in man and animals.

Humans cannot help but attribute human emotions to non-human animals. Although such attributions are often regarded as gratuitous anthropomorphisms and held apart from the attributions humans make about each other's internal states, they may be the product of a general mechanism for flexibly interpreting adaptive behavior. To examine this, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans to compare the neural mechanisms associated with attributing emotions to humans and non-human animal behavior.

The neural basis of conceptualizing the same action at different levels of abstraction.

People can conceptualize the same action (e.g. 'riding a bike') at different levels of abstraction (LOA), where higher LOAs specify the abstract motives that explain why the action is performed (e.

Folk explanations of behavior: a specialized use of a domain-general mechanism.

People typically explain others' behaviors by attributing them to the beliefs and motives of an unobservable mind. Although such attributional inferences are critical for understanding the social world, it is unclear whether they rely on processes distinct from those used to understand the nonsocial world. In the present study, we used functional MRI to identify brain regions associated with making attributions about social and nonsocial situations.

Amygdala lesions do not compromise the cortical network for false-belief reasoning.

The amygdala plays an integral role in human social cognition and behavior, with clear links to emotion recognition, trust judgments, anthropomorphization, and psychiatric disorders ranging from social phobia to autism. A central feature of human social cognition is a theory-of-mind (ToM) that enables the representation other people's mental states as distinct from one's own. Numerous neuroimaging studies of the best studied use of ToM--false-belief reasoning--suggest that it relies on a specific cortical network; moreover, the amygdala is structurally and functionally connected with many components of this cortical network.

The default mode of human brain function primes the intentional stance.

Humans readily adopt an intentional stance to other people, comprehending their behavior as guided by unobservable mental states such as belief, desire, and intention. We used fMRI in healthy adults to test the hypothesis that this stance is primed by the default mode of human brain function present when the mind is at rest. We report three findings that support this hypothesis.

Deconstructing and reconstructing theory of mind.

Usage of the term 'theory of mind' (ToM) has exploded across fields ranging from developmental psychology to social neuroscience and psychiatry research. However, its meaning is often vague and inconsistent, its biological bases are a subject of debate, and the methods used to study it are highly heterogeneous. Most crucially, its original definition does not permit easy downward translation to more basic processes such as those studied by behavioral neuroscience, leaving the interpretation of neuroimaging results opaque.

Validating the Why/How contrast for functional MRI studies of Theory of Mind.

The ability to impute mental states to others, or Theory of Mind (ToM), has been the subject of hundreds of neuroimaging studies. Although reviews and meta-analyses of these studies have concluded that ToM recruits a coherent brain network, mounting evidence suggests that this network is an abstraction based on pooling data from numerous studies, most of which use different behavioral tasks to investigate ToM. Problematically, this means that no single behavioral task can be used to reliably measure ToM Network function as currently conceived.

Reverse-correlating mental representations of sex-typed bodies: the effect of number of trials on image quality.

Sex categorization is a critical process in social perception. While psychologists have long theorized that perceivers have distinct mental representations of men and women that help them to achieve efficient sex categorizations, researchers have only recently begun using reverse-correlation to visualize the content of these mental representations. The present research addresses two issues concerning this relatively new methodological tool.

The busy social brain: evidence for automaticity and control in the neural systems supporting social cognition and action understanding.

Much social-cognitive processing is believed to occur automatically; however, the relative automaticity of the brain systems underlying social cognition remains largely undetermined. We used functional MRI to test for automaticity in the functioning of two brain systems that research has indicated are important for understanding other people's behavior: the mirror neuron system and the mentalizing system. Participants remembered either easy phone numbers (low cognitive load) or difficult phone numbers (high cognitive load) while observing actions after adopting one of four comprehension goals.

The phenomenology of error processing: the dorsal ACC response to stop-signal errors tracks reports of negative affect.

A reliable observation in neuroimaging studies of cognitive control is the response of dorsal ACC (dACC) to events that demand increased cognitive control (e.g., response conflicts and performance errors).

Dissociating modality-specific and supramodal neural systems for action understanding.

The neural basis of action understanding in humans remains disputed, with some research implicating the putative mirror neuron system (MNS) and some a mentalizing system (MZS) for inferring mental states. The basis for this dispute may be that action understanding is a heterogeneous construct: actions can be understood from sensory information about body movements or from language about action, and with the goal of understanding the implementation ("how") or motive ("why") of an action. Although extant research implicates the MNS in understanding implementation and the MZS in understanding motive, it remains unknown to what extent these systems subserve modality-specific or supramodal functions in action understanding.

Evidence for social working memory from a parametric functional MRI study.

Keeping track of various amounts of social cognitive information, including people's mental states, traits, and relationships, is fundamental to navigating social interactions. However, to date, no research has examined which brain regions support variable amounts of social information processing ("social load"). We developed a social working memory paradigm to examine the brain networks sensitive to social load.

Ascribing beliefs to ingroup and outgroup political candidates: neural correlates of perspective-taking, issue importance and days until the election.

We used the five weeks leading up to the 2008 presidential election as a backdrop to examine the ways that the brain processes attitudes and beliefs under different circumstances. We examined individual differences in personal issue importance and trait perspective-taking, as well as the temporal context in which attitude representation took place (i.e.

An integrative model of the neural systems supporting the comprehension of observed emotional behavior.

Understanding others' emotions requires both the identification of overt behaviors ("smiling") and the attribution of behaviors to a cause ("friendly disposition"). Previous research suggests that whereas emotion identification depends on a cortical mirror system that enables the embodiment of observed motor behavior within one's own motor system, causal attribution for emotion depends on a separate cortical mentalizing system, so-named because its function is associated with mental state representation. We used fMRI to test an Identification-Attribution model of mirror and mentalizing system contributions to the comprehension of emotional behavior.

Dissociable neural systems support retrieval of how and why action knowledge.

In everyday discourse, people typically represent actions in one of two ways: how they are performed or why they are performed. In the present study, we determined the neural systems that support these natural modes of representing actions. Participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while identifying how and why people perform various familiar actions.

Identifying the what, why, and how of an observed action: an fMRI study of mentalizing and mechanizing during action observation.

Humans commonly understand the unobservable mental states of others by observing their actions. Embodied simulation theories suggest that this ability may be based in areas of the fronto-parietal mirror neuron system, yet neuroimaging studies that explicitly investigate the human ability to draw mental state inferences point to the involvement of a “mentalizing" system consisting of regions that do not overlap with the mirror neuron system. For the present study, we developed a novel action identification paradigm that allowed us to explicitly investigate the neural bases of mentalizing observed actions.