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.

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.

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.

Judgments of agency refer to people's self-reflective assessments concerning their own control: their assessments of the extent to which they themselves are responsible for an action. These self-reflective metacognitive judgments can be distinguished from action monitoring , which involves the detection of the divergence (or lack of divergence) between observed states and expected states. Presumably, people form judgments of agency by metacognitively reflecting on the output of their action monitoring and then consciously inferring the extent to which they caused the action in question. Although a number of previous imaging studies have been directed at action monitoring, none have assessed judgments of agency as a potentially separate process. The present fMRI study used an agency paradigm that not only allowed us to examine the brain activity associated with action monitoring but that also enabled us to investigate those regions associated with metacognition of agency. Regarding action monitoring, we found that being “out of control” during the task (i.e., detection of a discrepancy between observed and expected states) was associated with increased brain activity in the right TPJ, whereas being “in control” was associated with increased activity in the pre-SMA, rostral cingulate zone, and dorsal striatum (regions linked to self-initiated action). In contrast, when participants made self-reflective metacognitive judgments about the extent of their own control (i.e., judgments of agency) compared with when they made judgments that were not about control (i.e., judgments of performance), increased activity was observed in the anterior PFC, a region associated with self-reflective processing. These results indicate that action monitoring is dissociable from people's conscious self-attributions of control.

Humans enjoy a singular capacity to imagine events that differ from the “here-and-now.” Recent cognitive neuroscience research has linked such simulation processes to the brain's “default network.” However, extant cognitive theories suggest that perceivers reliably simulate only relatively proximal experiences—those that seem nearby, soon, likely to happen, or relevant to a close other. Here, we test these claims by examining spontaneous engagement of the default network while perceivers consider experiencing events from proximal and distal perspectives. Across manipulations of perspective in four dimensions, two regions of the default network—medial prefrontal cortex and retrosplenial cortex—were more active for proximal than distal events, supporting cognitive accounts that perceivers only richly simulate experiences that seem immediate and that perceivers represent different dimensions of distance similarly. Moreover, stable individual differences in default activity when thinking about distal events correlated with individual variability in an implicit measure of psychological distance, suggesting that perceivers naturally vary in their tendency to simulate far-off or unlikely experiences.

People often make shortsighted decisions to receive small benefits in the present rather than large benefits in the future, that is, to favor their current selves over their future selves. In two studies using fMRI, we demonstrated that people make such decisions in part because they fail to engage in the same degree of self-referential processing when thinking about their future selves. When participants predicted how much they would enjoy an event in the future, they showed less activity in brain regions associated with introspective self-reference—such as the ventromedial pFC (vMPFC)—than when they predicted how much they would enjoy events in the present. Moreover, the magnitude of vMPFC reduction predicted the extent to which participants made shortsighted monetary decisions several weeks later. In light of recent findings that the vMPFC contributes to the ability to simulate future events from a first-person perspective, these data suggest that shortsighted decisions result in part from a failure to fully imagine the subjective experience of one's future self.

Although humans generally experience a coherent sense of selfhood, we can nevertheless articulate different aspects of self. Recent research has demonstrated that one such aspect of self—conceptual knowledge of one's own personality traits—is subserved by ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC). Here, we examined whether an alternative aspect of “self”—being an agent who acts to achieve one's own goals—relies on cognitive processes that overlap with or diverge from conceptual operationalizations of selfhood. While undergoing fMRI, participants completed tasks of both conceptual self-reference, in which they judged their own or another person's personality traits, and agentic self-reference, in which they freely chose an object or watched passively as one was chosen. The agentic task failed to modulate vMPFC, despite producing the same memory enhancement frequently observed during conceptual self-referential processing (the “self-reference” effect). Instead, agentic self-reference was associated with activation of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), a region previously implicated in planning and executing actions. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that IPS activity correlated with later memory performance for the agentic, but not conceptual, task. These results support views of the “self” as a collection of distinct mental operations distributed throughout the brain, rather than a unitary cognitive system.

Judging people on the basis of cultural stereotypes is a ubiquitous facet of daily life, yet little is known about how this fundamental inferential strategy is implemented in the brain. Using fMRI, we measured neural activity while participants made judgments about the likely actor (i.e., person-focus) and location (i.e., place-focus) of a series of activities, some of which were associated with prevailing gender stereotypes. Results revealed that stereotyping was underpinned by activity in areas associated with evaluative processing (e.g., ventral medial prefrontal cortex, amygdala) and the representation of action knowledge (e.g., supramarginal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus). In addition, activity accompanying stereotypic judgments was correlated with the strength of participants' explicit and implicit gender stereotypes. These findings elucidate how stereotyping fits within the neuroscience of person understanding.

Recent research has focused on the disparate mechanisms that support the human ability to “mentalize” about the thoughts and feelings of others. One such process may rely on precompiled, semantic beliefs about the characteristics common to members of a social group, that is, on stereotypes ; for example, judging that a woman may be more likely than a man to have certain interests or opinions. In the current study, we identified a pattern of neural activity associated with the use of stereotypes to judge another person's psychological characteristics. During fMRI scanning, participants mentalized about the likely responses of a female and male target to a series of questions, some of which were related to gender stereotypes (e.g., “enjoys shopping for new clothes”). Trials on which participants applied a stereotype were segregated from those on which participants avoided stereotype use. The BOLD response in an extensive region of the right frontal cortex differentiated stereotype-applied from -unapplied trials. Moreover, this neural difference was correlated with a behavioral index of gender associations—the Implicit Association Test—administered after scanning. Results suggest that stereotype application may draw on cognitive processes that more generally subserve semantic knowledge about categories.

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been implicated in seemingly disparate cognitive functions, such as understanding the minds of other people and processing information about the self. This functional overlap would be expected if humans use their own experiences to infer the mental states of others, a basic postulate of simulation theory. Neural activity was measured while participants attended to either the mental or physical aspects of a series of other people. To permit a test of simulation theory's prediction that inferences based on self-reflection should only be made for similar others, targets were subsequently rated for their degree of similarity to self. Parametric analyses revealed a region of the ventral mPFC—previously implicated in self-referencing tasks—in which activity correlated with perceived self/other similarity, but only for mentalizing trials. These results suggest that self-reflection may be used to infer the mental states of others when they are sufficiently similar to self.

Misattribution refers to the act of attributing a memory or idea to an incorrect source, such as successfully remembering a bit of information but linking it to an inappropriate person or time [Jacoby, L. L., Kelley, C., Brown, J., & Jasechko, J. (1989). Becoming famous overnight: Limits on the ability to avoid unconscious influences of the past. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 326–338; Schacter, D. L. (1999). The seven sins of memory: Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. American Psychologist, 54, 182–203; Schacter, D. L. (2001). The seven sins of memory: How the mind forgets and remembers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin]. Cognitive studies have suggested that misattribution errors may occur in the absence of recollection for the details of an initial encounter with a stimulus, but little is known about the neural basis of this memory phenomenon. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the hypothesized role of recollection in counteracting the illusory truth effect, a misattribution error whereby perceivers systematically overrate the truth of previously presented information. Imaging was conducted during the encoding and subsequent judgment of unfamiliar statements that were presented as true or false. Event-related fMRI analyses were conditionalized as a function of subsequent performance. Results demonstrated that encoding activation in regions previously associated with successful recollection—including the hippocampus and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC)—correlated with the successful avoidance of misattribution errors, providing initial neuroimaging support for earlier cognitive accounts of misattribution.

Conscious behavioral intentions can frequently fail under conditions of attentional depletion. In attempting to trace the cognitive origin of this effect, we hypothesized that failures of action control—specifically, oculomotor movement—can result from the imposition of fronto-executive load. To evaluate this prediction, participants performed an antisaccade task while simultaneously completing a working-memory task that is known to make variable demands on prefrontal processes (n-back task, see Jonides et al., 1997). The results of two experiments are reported. As expected, antisaccade error rates were increased in accordance with the fronto-executive demands of the n-back task (Experiment 1). In addition, the debilitating effects of working-memory load were restricted to the inhibitory component of the antisaccade task (Experiment 2). These findings corroborate the view that working memory operations play a critical role in the suppression of prepotent behavioral responses.