Overcoming Pavlovian bias in semantic space.

Action is invigorated in the presence of reward-predicting stimuli and inhibited in the presence of punishment-predicting stimuli. Although valuable as a heuristic, this Pavlovian bias can also lead to maladaptive behaviour and is implicated in addiction. Here we explore whether Pavlovian bias can be overcome through training.

Social training reconfigures prediction errors to shape Self-Other boundaries.

Selectively attributing beliefs to specific agents is core to reasoning about other people and imagining oneself in different states. Evidence suggests humans might achieve this by simulating each other's computations in agent-specific neural circuits, but it is not known how circuits become agent-specific. Here we investigate whether agent-specificity adapts to social context.

Agent-specific learning signals for self-other distinction during mentalising.

Humans have a remarkable ability to simulate the minds of others. How the brain distinguishes between mental states attributed to self and mental states attributed to someone else is unknown. Here, we investigated how fundamental neural learning signals are selectively attributed to different agents.