6 Functional anatomy of human social cognition

Social cognitive processes Humans and their ancestors have lived in social groups for millions of years. This history has provided selection pressures for the ability to predict conspe-cifics' actions (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). Though it might be possible to predict people's behavior directly by extrapolating from past observations, doing so on the basis of inferred mental states and traits—including intentions and goals, emotions, personality traits, and beliefs—is more economical and may yield more accurate predictions, especially in complex social contexts (Dennett, 1987; Humphrey, 1984). Evidence from social and developmental psychology shows that humans are very sensitive, from an early age, to cues that can enable predictions about behavior. In fact, our propensity to attribute mental states extends to inanimate objects, appearing as a tendency towards anthropomorphism (Boyer, 2003; Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000). In the present chapter, we will focus on the neural circuitry subserving the attribution of animacy and intention (that an object is alive and that it is a mental object), emotional states, personality traits, and intentional or belief states (" theory of mind " [ToM]) to others. This focus is consistent with Brothers' (Brothers, 1990) definition of social cognition as " the processing of any information which culminates in the accurate perception of the dispositions and intentions of other individuals " (p. 28). Some processes that fall under the rubric of social cognition appear to be perceptual, in that they are fast and apparently automatic, and seem to be relatively little influenced by top-down processes. Others appear to rely more on conceptual knowledge, and thus might more properly be called attributional. In this chapter, we will distinguish between these terms as follows. When processes appear to be primarily stimulus-driven, and to rely little or not at all on context or top-down contributions, we will refer to them as perception. When processes appear to be equal parts bottom-up and top-down, we will refer to them as recognition. Finally, when processes appear to be largely top-down, or when it is unclear how to categorize a given process or set of processes, we will refer to them as attribution. A bit about organization: Though this chapter is organized in terms of different social cognitive processes, it could have been organized in at least two other ways; that is, by anatomical structure (for example, a section reviewing all the social cognitive processes in which the amygdala is implicated) and by levels of …