Social cognition and the brain: A meta‐analysis

Abstract

This meta-analysis explores the location and function of brain areas involved in social cognition, or the capacity to understand people's behavioral intentions, social beliefs, and personality traits. On the basis of over 200 fMRI studies, it tests alternative theoretical proposals that attempt to explain how several brain areas process information relevant for social cognition. The results suggest that inferring temporary states such as goals, intentions, and desires of other people-even when they are false and unjust from our own perspective-strongly engages the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). Inferring more enduring dispositions of others and the self, or interpersonal norms and scripts, engages the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), although temporal states can also activate the mPFC. Other candidate tasks reflecting general-purpose brain processes that may potentially subserve social cognition are briefly reviewed, such as sequence learning, causality detection, emotion processing, and executive functioning (action monitoring, attention, dual task monitoring, episodic memory retrieval), but none of them overlaps uniquely with the regions activated during social cognition. Hence, it appears that social cognition particularly engages the TPJ and mPFC regions. The available evidence is consistent with the role of a TPJ-related mirror system for inferring temporary goals and intentions at a relatively perceptual level of representation, and the mPFC as a module that integrates social information across time and allows reflection and representation of traits and norms, and presumably also of intentionality, at a more abstract cognitive level.

Right Temporoparietal Gray Matter Predicts Accuracy of Social Perception in the Autism Spectrum

“…Most of the regions in which we found gray matter reductions have consistently been implicated in socio-emotional processing and communication abilities that are deficient in ASD, such as (i) theory of mind (Di Martino et al 2009;Van Overwalle, 2009;Sugranyes et al 2011), (ii) mirror neuron functioning and language (Lai et al 2012;Molenberghs et al 2012), and (iii) limbic system functions (Sugranyes et al 2011). However, some of the aforementioned regions have also been associated with functions other than social ones.…”

The mentalizing network orchestrates the impact of parochial altruism on social norm enforcement

“…We report results in a priori regions of interests (previously defined in neuroimaging studies on punishment [Buckholtz et al, 2008;de Quervain et al, 2004;Knoch et al, 2006;Sanfey et al, 2003;Spitzer et al, 2007;Strobel et al, 2011] and mentalizing [Van Overwalle 2009]): OFG, right lateral PFC, caudatus, DMPFC, TPJ where activations are significant at P < 0.005 uncorrected for multiple comparisons with an extent threshold of 10 voxels [Lieberman and Cunningham, 2009], and survive small volume corrections (SVC) for multiple comparisons (or family-wise error [FWE] corrections across the whole brain). The SVC procedure, as implemented in SPM5 using the FWE correction procedure (P < 0.05), allows results to be corrected for multiple nonindependent comparisons with a defined region of interest.…”

“…For the SVC procedure, we used anatomical masks (lateral OFG, caudatus) obtained from the WFU PickAtlas toolbox [Maldjian et al, 2003], and 20 mm spheres centered on coordinates derived from previous work. For the areas of the mentalizing network, we used a recently published meta-analysis [Van Overwalle, 2009] on social cognition to define the peaks in the lTPJ (x ¼ À49,…”

“…The data also supports our second prediction that the much lower punishment of ingroup members is associated with activation of brain regions associated with mentalizing processes because we find increased activity in the DMPFC and bilateral TPJ when the third parties face an ingroup defector (compared with an outgroup defector). If third-parties attempt to understand the intentions or goals behind ingroup members' defective behavior because they try to find mitigating reasons that provide an excuse for ingroup defectors, we would expect the activation of DMPFC and TPJ because these two brain regions are key components in the mentalizing network known to be involved in inferring temporary goals, intentions, desires, as well as more enduring dispositions of others [Gallagher and Frith, 2003;Hampton et al, 2008;Mitchell et al, 2005;Steinbeis and Koelsch, 2009;Van Overwalle, 2009]. Our connectivity findings both within the mentalizing network and between the mentalizing and the punishment network corroborate the hypothesis that the mentalizing regions modulate punishment behavior.…”

“…Thus, third-parties may try to understand the underlying reasons and intentions of ingroup member's defective behavior and may consequently find a justification for the defective act. If this hypothesis is correct, we would expect to find increased activity in the mentalizing network of the brain, including the dorsomedial PFC (DMPFC) and the bilateral temporoparietal junction (TPJ), because this kind of psychological processes-inferring temporary goals, intentions, desires as well as more enduring dispositions of others-have been strongly and consistently associated with this brain network [Gallagher and Frith, 2003;Van Overwalle, 2009]. Finally, if the assumed mentalizing/justification process indeed occurs in the third-party brain, resulting in a reduced negative evaluation and associated reduced punishment behavior, we would expect the areas of the mentalizing network to be functionally connected with the Design and decision screen.…”