Social Cognition

As humans, many of the most important ecological high-level cognitive processes our brain is capable of are linked to social ability. We have always been interested in the computational mechanisms underlying our capacity to reason about other agents.

we have recently finished a project about the behavioural and neural computations of tracking shared and privileged evidence and the construction of self and other beliefs during social decision making. This project aimed at understanding the basic computations in prefrontal cortex underlying our ability to reason with varying reference frames and competing world models, which is important for social but can also be exploited for non-social decision making and problem solving.

Specifically, we could show that participants, while large being able to suppress privileged information when making social predictions about the actions of a less knowledgeable other agents, they could not help being biased by such "occluded" information. This suggest that they might be constructing their predictions of other peoples behaviour by retrieving their own believes of the world first.

This world-first construction that is then modulated by ones knowledge of how other people differ, was further supported by the neural dynamics during the choice. Specifically, when occluded information needed to be ignored there was a distinct increase of activity in pre-SMA, which otherwise deactivated with increased evidence, as if to insure irrelevant social information does not contaminate participants social predictions.

Reference: Kolling N*, Braunsdorf M*, Vijayakumar S, Bekkering H, Toni I, & Mars R. (2021) Constructing others' beliefs from one's own using medial frontal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, doi: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0011-21.2021