A Role for Uncertainty in the Neural Distinction Between Social and Nonsocial Thought

Abstract

Neuroimaging research has identified a network of brain regions that is consistently more engaged when people think about the minds of other people than when they engage in nonsocial tasks. Activations in this “mentalizing network” are sometimes interpreted as evidence for the domain-specificity of cognitive processes supporting social thought. Here, we examine the alternative possibility that at least some activations in the mentalizing network may be explained by uncertainty. A reconsideration of findings from existing functional MRI studies in light of new data from independent raters suggests that (a) social tasks used in past studies have higher levels of uncertainty than their nonsocial comparison tasks and (b) activation in a key brain region associated with social cognition, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), may track with the degree of uncertainty surrounding both social and nonsocial inferences. These observations suggest that the preferential DMPFC response observed consistently in social scenarios may reflect the engagement of domain-general processes of uncertainty reduction, which points to avenues for future research into the core cognitive mechanisms supporting typical and atypical social thought.