Frontotemporal contributions to social and non-social semantic judgements.

Semantic judgements involve the use of general knowledge about the world in specific situations. Such judgements are typically associated with activity in a number of brain regions that include the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). However, previous studies showed activity in brain regions associated with mentalizing, including the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ), in semantic judgements that involved social knowledge. The aim of the present study was to investigate if social and non-social semantic judgements are dissociated using a combination of fMRI and repetitive TMS. To study this, we asked participants to estimate the percentage of exemplars in a given category that shared a specified attribute. Categories could be either social (i.e., stereotypes) or non-social (i.e., object categories). As expected, fMRI results (n = 26) showed enhanced activity in the left IFG that was specific to non-social semantic judgements. However, statistical evidence did not support that repetitive TMS stimulation (n = 19) to this brain region specifically disrupted non-social semantic judgements. Also as expected, the right TPJ showed enhanced activity to social semantic judgements. However, statistical evidence did not support that repetitive TMS stimulation to this brain region specifically disrupted social semantic judgements. It is possible that the causal networks involved in social and non-social semantic judgements may be more complex than expected.

Confirmation of interpersonal expectations is intrinsically rewarding.

People want to interact successfully with other individuals, and they invest significant efforts in attempting to do so. Decades of research have demonstrated that to simplify the dauntingly complex task of interpersonal communication, perceivers predict the responses of individuals in their environment using stereotypes and other sources of prior knowledge. Here, we show that these top-down expectations can also shape the subjective value of expectation-consistent and expectation-violating targets. Specifically, in two neuroimaging experiments (n = 58), we observed increased activation in brain regions associated with reward processing-including the nucleus accumbens-when perceivers observed information consistent with their social expectations. In two additional behavioral experiments (n = 704), we observed that perceivers were willing to forgo money to encounter an expectation-consistent target and avoid an expectation-violating target. Together, these findings suggest that perceivers value having their social expectations confirmed, much like food or monetary rewards.

Human Face-Selective Cortex Does Not Distinguish between Members of a Racial Outgroup.

People often fail to individuate members of social outgroups, a phenomenon known as the outgroup homogeneity effect. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) repetition suppression to investigate the neural representation underlying this effect. In a preregistered study, White human perceivers (N = 29) responded to pairs of faces depicting White or Black targets. In each pair, the second face depicted either the same target as the first face, a different target from the same race, or a scrambled face outline. We localized face-selective neural regions via an independent task, and demonstrated that neural activity in the fusiform face area (FFA) distinguished different faces only when targets belonged to the perceivers' racial ingroup (White). By contrast, face-selective cortex did not discriminate between other-race individuals. Moreover, across two studies (total N = 67) perceivers were slower to discriminate between different outgroup members and remembered them to a lesser extent. Together, these results suggest that the outgroup homogeneity effect arises when early-to-mid-level visual processing results in an erroneous overlap of representations of outgroup members.

Wanting without enjoying: The social value of sharing experiences.

Social connection can be a rich source of happiness. Humans routinely go out of their way to seek out social connection and avoid social isolation. What are the proximal forces that motivate people to share experiences with others? Here we used a novel experience-sharing and decision-making paradigm to understand the value of shared experiences. In seven experiments across Studies 1 and 2, participants demonstrated a strong motivation to engage in shared experiences. At the same time, participants did not report a commensurate increase in hedonic value or emotional amplification, suggesting that the motivation to share experiences need not derive from their immediate hedonic value. In Study 3, participants reported their explicit beliefs about the reasons people engage in shared experiences: Participants reported being motivated by the desire to forge a social connection. Together, these findings suggest that the desire to share an experience may be distinct from the subjective experience of achieving that state. People may be so driven to connect with each other that social experiences remain valuable even in the most minimalistic contexts.

Theories of Person Perception Predict Patterns of Neural Activity During Mentalizing.

Social life requires making inferences about other people. What information do perceivers spontaneously draw upon to make such inferences? Here, we test 4 major theories of person perception, and 1 synthetic theory that combines their features, to determine whether the dimensions of such theories can serve as bases for describing patterns of neural activity during mentalizing. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants made social judgments about well-known public figures. Patterns of brain activity were then predicted using feature encoding models that represented target people's positions on theoretical dimensions such as warmth and competence. All 5 theories of person perception proved highly accurate at reconstructing activity patterns, indicating that each could describe the informational basis of mentalizing. Cross-validation indicated that the theories robustly generalized across both targets and participants. The synthetic theory consistently attained the best performance-approximately two-thirds of noise ceiling accuracy--indicating that, in combination, the theories considered here can account for much of the neural representation of other people. Moreover, encoding models trained on the present data could reconstruct patterns of activity associated with mental state representations in independent data, suggesting the use of a common neural code to represent others' traits and states.

Consistent Neural Activity Patterns Represent Personally Familiar People.

How does the brain encode and organize our understanding of the people we know? In this study, participants imagined personally familiar others in a variety of contexts while undergoing fMRI. Using multivoxel pattern analysis, we demonstrated that thinking about familiar others elicits consistent fine-grained patterns of neural activity. Person-specific patterns were distributed across many regions previously associated with social cognition, including medial prefrontal, medial parietal, and lateral temporoparietal cortices, as well as other regions including the anterior and mid-cingulate, insula, and precentral gyrus. Analogous context-specific patterns were observed in medial parietal and superior occipital regions. These results suggest that medial parietal cortex may play a particularly central role in simulating familiar others, as this is the only region to simultaneously represent both person and context information. Moreover, within portions of medial parietal cortex, the degree to which person-specific patterns were typically instated on a given trial predicted subsequent judgments of accuracy and vividness in the mental simulation. This suggests that people may access neural representations in this region to form metacognitive judgments of confidence in their mental simulations. In addition to fine-grained patterns within brain regions, we also observed encoding of both familiar people and contexts in coarse-grained patterns spread across the independently defined social brain network. Finally, we found tentative evidence that several established theories of person perception might explain the relative similarity between person-specific patterns within the social brain network.

Neural Representations of Belief Concepts: A Representational Similarity Approach to Social Semantics.

The present experiment identified neural regions that represent a class of concepts that are independent of perceptual or sensory attributes. During functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning, participants viewed names of social groups (e.g. Atheists, Evangelicals, and Economists) and performed a one-back similarity judgment according to 1 of 2 dimensions of belief attributes: political orientation (Liberal to Conservative) or spiritualism (Spiritualist to Materialist). By generalizing across a wide variety of social groups that possess these beliefs, these attribute concepts did not coincide with any specific sensory quality, allowing us to target conceptual, rather than perceptual, representations. Multi-voxel pattern searchlight analysis was used to identify regions in which activation patterns distinguished the 2 ends of both dimensions: Conservative from Liberal social groups when participants focused on the political orientation dimension, and spiritual from Materialist groups when participants focused on the spiritualism dimension. A cluster in right precuneus exhibited such a pattern, indicating that it carries information about belief-attribute concepts and forms part of semantic memory-perhaps a component particularly concerned with psychological traits. This region did not overlap with the theory of mind network, which engaged nearby, but distinct, parts of precuneus. These findings have implications for the neural organization of conceptual knowledge, especially the understanding of social groups.

Prosocial Conformity: Prosocial Norms Generalize Across Behavior and Empathy.

Generosity is contagious: People imitate others' prosocial behaviors. However, research on such prosocial conformity focuses on cases in which people merely reproduce others' positive actions. Hence, we know little about the breadth of prosocial conformity. Can prosocial conformity cross behavior types or even jump from behavior to affect? Five studies address these questions. In Studies 1 to 3, participants decided how much to donate to charities before learning that others donated generously or stingily. Participants who observed generous donations donated more than those who observed stingy donations (Studies 1 and 2). Crucially, this generalized across behaviors: Participants who observed generous donations later wrote more supportive notes to another participant (Study 3). In Studies 4 and 5, participants observed empathic or non-empathic group responses to vignettes. Group empathy ratings not only shifted participants' own empathic feelings (Study 4), but they also influenced participants' donations to a homeless shelter (Study 5). These findings reveal the remarkable breadth of prosocial conformity.

Noticing Future Me: Reducing Egocentrism Through Mental Imagery.

People drastically overestimate how often others attend to them or notice their unusual features, a phenomenon termed the spotlight effect Despite the prevalence of this egocentric bias, little is known about how to reduce the tendency to see oneself as the object of others' attention. Here, we tested the hypothesis that a basic property of mental imagery-the visual perspective from which an event is viewed-may alleviate a future-oriented variant of the spotlight effect. The results of three experiments supported this prediction. Experiment 1 revealed a reduction in egocentric spotlighting when participants imagined an event in the far compared with near future. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated reduced spotlighting and feelings of embarrassment when participants viewed an impending event from a third-person (vs. first-person) vantage point. Simple changes in one's visual perspective may be sufficient to diminish the illusion of personal salience.

Neural evidence that three dimensions organize mental state representation: Rationality, social impact, and valence.

How do people understand the minds of others? Existing psychological theories have suggested a number of dimensions that perceivers could use to make sense of others' internal mental states. However, it remains unclear which of these dimensions, if any, the brain spontaneously uses when we think about others. The present study used multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) of neuroimaging data to identify the primary organizing principles of social cognition. We derived four unique dimensions of mental state representation from existing psychological theories and used functional magnetic resonance imaging to test whether these dimensions organize the neural encoding of others' mental states. MVPA revealed that three such dimensions could predict neural patterns within the medial prefrontal and parietal cortices, temporoparietal junction, and anterior temporal lobes during social thought: rationality, social impact, and valence. These results suggest that these dimensions serve as organizing principles for our understanding of other people.

Reading fiction and reading minds: the role of simulation in the default network.

Research in psychology has suggested that reading fiction can improve individuals' social-cognitive abilities. Findings from neuroscience show that reading and social cognition both recruit the default network, a network which is known to support our capacity to simulate hypothetical scenes, spaces and mental states. The current research tests the hypothesis that fiction reading enhances social cognition because it serves to exercise the default subnetwork involved in theory of mind. While undergoing functional neuroimaging, participants read literary passages that differed along two dimensions: (i) vivid vs abstract and (ii) social vs non-social. Analyses revealed distinct subnetworks of the default network respond to the two dimensions of interest: the medial temporal lobe subnetwork responded preferentially to vivid passages, with or without social content; the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) subnetwork responded preferentially to passages with social and abstract content. Analyses also demonstrated that participants who read fiction most often also showed the strongest social cognition performance. Finally, mediation analysis showed that activity in the dmPFC subnetwork in response to the social content mediated this relation, suggesting that the simulation of social content in fiction plays a role in fiction's ability to enhance readers' social cognition.

Informing others is associated with behavioral and neural signatures of value.

One of the many proclivities of our species is the drive to share information with others. What drives this unusual proclivity for propagating knowledge? Here, we test a common prediction made by recent theories in this domain: that individuals value opportunities to inform others. Two sets of studies supported this hypothesis. Behaviorally, individuals gave up money to inform others, even in "minimalistic" settings under which informing neither improved participants' reputation nor provided material benefits to information recipients. Neurally, opportunities to inform others engaged brain regions associated with motivation and reward, including the nucleus accumbens and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Together, these findings suggest that people place intrinsic value on sharing information with others.

Turning I into me: Imagining your future self.

A widely endorsed belief is that perceivers imagine their present selves using a different representational format than imagining their future selves (i.e., near future=first-person; distant future=third-person). But is this really the case? Responding to the paucity of work on this topic, here we considered how temporal distance influences the extent to which individuals direct their attention outward or inward during a brief imaginary episode. Using a non-verbal measure of visual perspective taking (i.e., letter-drawing task) our results confirmed the hypothesized relation between temporal distance and conceptions of the self. Whereas simulations of an event in the near future were dominated by a first-person representation of the self, this switched to a third-person depiction when the event was located in the distant future. Critically, this switch in vantage point was restricted to self-related simulations. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are considered.

Neural activity associated with self, other, and object-based counterfactual thinking.

Previous research has shown that autobiographical episodic counterfactual thinking-i.e., mental simulations about alternative ways in which one's life experiences could have occurred-engages the brain's default network (DN). However, it remains unknown whether or not the DN is also engaged during impersonal counterfactual thoughts, specifically those involving other people or objects. The current study compares brain activity during counterfactual simulations involving the self, others and objects. In addition, counterfactual thoughts involving others were manipulated in terms of similarity and familiarity with the simulated characters. The results indicate greater involvement of DN during person-based (i.e., self and other) as opposed to object-based counterfactual simulations. However, the involvement of different regions of the DN during other-based counterfactual simulations was modulated by how close and/or similar the simulated character was perceived to be by the participant. Simulations involving unfamiliar characters preferentially recruited dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Simulations involving unfamiliar similar characters, characters with whom participants identified personality traits, recruited lateral temporal gyrus. Finally, our results also revealed differential coupling of right hippocampus with lateral prefrontal and temporal cortex during counterfactual simulations involving familiar similar others, but with left transverse temporal gyrus and medial frontal and inferior temporal gyri during counterfactual simulations involving either oneself or unfamiliar dissimilar others. These results suggest that different brain mechanisms are involved in the simulation of personal and impersonal counterfactual thoughts, and that the extent to which regions associated with autobiographical memory are recruited during the simulation of counterfactuals involving others depends on the perceived similarity and familiarity with the simulated individuals.

Activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex co-varies with revealed social preferences: evidence for person-invariant value.

Although altruistic and selfish behaviors seem fundamentally incommensurable humans regularly choose between them. One model of such choices suggests that individuals ascribe a common form of subjective value to their own outcomes and those of others. To test this 'person invariance' hypothesis, we asked individuals to choose between allocating varying amounts of money to themselves or to a partner. Participants' choice patterns provided an estimate of the relative value they placed on their own and others' gains. These estimates were used to isolate neural activity correlating with the subjective value of gains irrespective of the recipient (self or other) during a separate set of trials in which rewards were offered only to the self or partner. Activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex scaled with this person-invariant value parameter, consistent with earlier demonstrations that this region supports common value computation. These data suggest that individuals reduce the value associated with their own and others' experiences to a common subjective scale, which is used to guide social decision-making.

Spontaneous mentalizing predicts the fundamental attribution error.

When explaining the reasons for others' behavior, perceivers often overemphasize underlying dispositions and personality traits over the power of the situation, a tendency known as the fundamental attribution error. One possibility is that this bias results from the spontaneous processing of others' mental states, such as their momentary feelings or more enduring personality characteristics. Here, we use fMRI to test this hypothesis. Participants read a series of stories that described a target's ambiguous behavior in response to a specific social situation and later judged whether that act was attributable to the target's internal dispositions or to external situational factors. Neural regions consistently associated with mental state inference-especially, the medial pFC-strongly predicted whether participants later made dispositional attributions. These results suggest that the spontaneous engagement of mentalizing may underlie the biased tendency to attribute behavior to dispositional over situational forces.

Multivoxel patterns in fusiform face area differentiate faces by sex and race.

Although prior research suggests that fusiform gyrus represents the sex and race of faces, it remains unclear whether fusiform face area (FFA)-the portion of fusiform gyrus that is functionally-defined by its preferential response to faces-contains such representations. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to evaluate whether FFA represents faces by sex and race. Participants were scanned while they categorized the sex and race of unfamiliar Black men, Black women, White men, and White women. Multivariate pattern analysis revealed that multivoxel patterns in FFA-but not other face-selective brain regions, other category-selective brain regions, or early visual cortex-differentiated faces by sex and race. Specifically, patterns of voxel-based responses were more similar between individuals of the same sex than between men and women, and between individuals of the same race than between Black and White individuals. By showing that FFA represents the sex and race of faces, this research contributes to our emerging understanding of how the human brain perceives individuals from two fundamental social categories.

Toward open sharing of task-based fMRI data: the OpenfMRI project.

The large-scale sharing of task-based functional neuroimaging data has the potential to allow novel insights into the organization of mental function in the brain, but the field of neuroimaging has lagged behind other areas of bioscience in the development of data sharing resources. This paper describes the OpenFMRI project (accessible online at http://www.openfmri.org), which aims to provide the neuroimaging community with a resource to support open sharing of task-based fMRI studies. We describe the motivation behind the project, focusing particularly on how this project addresses some of the well-known challenges to sharing of task-based fMRI data. Results from a preliminary analysis of the current database are presented, which demonstrate the ability to classify between task contrasts with high generalization accuracy across subjects, and the ability to identify individual subjects from their activation maps with moderately high accuracy. Clustering analyses show that the similarity relations between statistical maps have a somewhat orderly relation to the mental functions engaged by the relevant tasks. These results highlight the potential of the project to support large-scale multivariate analyses of the relation between mental processes and brain function.

Common brain regions with distinct patterns of neural responses during mentalizing about groups and individuals.

An individual has a mind; a group does not. Yet humans routinely endow groups with mental states irreducible to any of their members (e.g., "scientists hope to understand every aspect of nature"). But are these mental states categorically similar to those we attribute to individuals? In two fMRI experiments, we tested this question against a set of brain regions that are consistently associated with social cognition--medial pFC, anterior temporal lobe, TPJ, and medial parietal cortex. Participants alternately answered questions about the mental states and physical attributes of individual people and groups. Regions previously associated with mentalizing about individuals were also robustly responsive to judgments of groups, suggesting that perceivers deploy the same social-cognitive processes when thinking about the mind of an individual and the "mind" of a group. However, multivariate searchlight analysis revealed that several of these regions showed distinct multivoxel patterns of response to groups and individual people, suggesting that perceivers maintain distinct representations of groups and individuals during mental state inferences. These findings suggest that perceivers mentalize about groups in a manner qualitatively similar to mentalizing about individual people, but that the brain nevertheless maintains important distinctions between the representations of such entities.

Anchoring and adjustment during social inferences.

Simulation theories of social cognition suggest that people use their own mental states to understand those of others-particularly similar others. However, perceivers cannot rely solely on self-knowledge to understand another person; they must also correct for differences between the self and others. Here we investigated serial adjustment as a mechanism for correction from self-knowledge anchors during social inferences. In 3 studies, participants judged the attitudes of a similar or dissimilar person and reported their own attitudes. For each item, we calculated the discrepancy between responses for the self and other. The adjustment process unfolds serially, so to the extent that individuals indeed anchor on self-knowledge and then adjust away, trials with a large amount of self-other discrepancy should be associated with longer response times, whereas small self-other discrepancy should correspond to shorter response times. Analyses consistently revealed this positive linear relationship between reaction time and self-other discrepancy, evidence of anchoring-and-adjustment, but only during judgments of similar targets. These results suggest that perceivers mentalize about similar others using the cognitive process of anchoring-and-adjustment.