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Metacognition concerns the processes by which we monitor and control our own cognitive processes. It can also be applied to others, in which case it is known as mentalizing. Both kinds of metacognition have implicit and explicit forms, where implicit means automatic and without awareness. Implicit metacognition enables us to adopt a we-mode, through which we automatically take account of the knowledge and intentions of others. Adoption of this mode enhances joint action. Explicit metacognition enables us to reflect on and justify our behaviour to others. However, access to the underlying processes is very limited for both self and others and our reports on our own and others' intentions can be very inaccurate. On the other hand, recent experiments have shown that, through discussions of our perceptual experiences with others, we can detect sensory signals more accurately, even in the absence of objective feedback. Through our willingness to discuss with others the reasons for our actions and perceptions, we overcome our lack of direct access to the underlying cognitive processes. This creates the potential for us to build more accurate accounts of the world and of ourselves. I suggest, therefore, that explicit metacognition is a uniquely human ability that has evolved through its enhancement of collaborative decision-making.

Consciousness has evolved and is a feature of all animals with sufficiently complex nervous systems. It is, therefore, primarily a problem for biology, rather than physics. In this review, I will consider three aspects of consciousness: level of consciousness, whether we are awake or in a coma; the contents of consciousness, what determines how a small amount of sensory information is associated with subjective experience, while the rest is not; and meta-consciousness, the ability to reflect upon our subjective experiences and, importantly, to share them with others. I will discuss and compare current theories of the neural and cognitive mechanisms involved in producing these three aspects of consciousness and conclude that the research in this area is flourishing and has already succeeded to delineate these mechanisms in surprising detail.

No parent needs reminding that children are born with a surprising set of abilities. But children still need many hours of guidance and instruction. Heyes and Frith review one particular social cognitive skill: reading the minds of others (or at least working out what other people are thinking and feeling). An unrefined capacity for “mind reading” is present in infants, but teaching is necessary to develop the full-blown capacity seen in adults. The authors draw parallels between learning to read and learning to read minds. Science , this issue p. 10.1126/science.1243091 It is not just a manner of speaking: “Mind reading,” or working out what others are thinking and feeling, is markedly similar to print reading. Both of these distinctly human skills recover meaning from signs, depend on dedicated cortical areas, are subject to genetically heritable disorders, show cultural variation around a universal core, and regulate how people behave. But when it comes to development, the evidence is conflicting. Some studies show that, like learning to read print, learning to read minds is a long, hard process that depends on tuition. Others indicate that even very young, nonliterate infants are already capable of mind reading. Here, we propose a resolution to this conflict. We suggest that infants are equipped with neurocognitive mechanisms that yield accurate expectations about behavior (“automatic” or “implicit” mind reading), whereas “explicit” mind reading, like literacy, is a culturally inherited skill; it is passed from one generation to the next by verbal instruction.

The notion that there is a 'social brain' in humans specialized for social interactions has received considerable support from brain imaging and, to a lesser extent, from lesion studies. Specific roles for the various components of the social brain are beginning to emerge. For example, the amygdala attaches emotional value to faces, enabling us to recognize expressions such as fear and trustworthiness, while the posterior superior temporal sulcus predicts the end point of the complex trajectories created when agents act upon the world. It has proved more difficult to assign a role to medial prefrontal cortex, which is consistently activated when people think about mental states. I suggest that this region may have a special role in the second-order representations needed for communicative acts when we have to represent someone else's representation of our own mental state. These cognitive processes are not specifically social, since they can be applied in other domains. However, these cognitive processes have been driven to ever higher levels of sophistication by the complexities of social interaction.

Social cognition concerns the various psychological processes that enable individuals to take advantage of being part of a social group. Of major importance to social cognition are the various social signals that enable us to learn about the world. Such signals include facial expressions, such as fear and disgust, which warn us of danger, and eye gaze direction, which indicate where interesting things can be found. Such signals are particularly important in infant development. Social referencing, for example, refers to the phenomenon in which infants refer to their mothers' facial expressions to determine whether or not to approach a novel object. We can learn a great deal simply by observing others. Much of this signalling seems to happen automatically and unconsciously on the part of both the sender and the receiver. We can learn to fear a stimulus by observing the response of another, in the absence of awareness of that stimulus. By contrast, learning by instruction, rather than observation, does seem to depend upon awareness of the stimulus, since such learning does not generalize to situations where the stimulus is presented subliminally. Learning by instruction depends upon a meta-cognitive process through which both the sender and the receiver recognize that signals are intended to be signals. An example would be the 'ostensive' signals that indicate that what follows are intentional communications. Infants learn more from signals that they recognize to be instructive. I speculate that it is this ability to recognize and learn from instructions rather than mere observation which permitted that advanced ability to benefit from cultural learning that seems to be unique to the human race.

Key Points Hallucinations (false perceptions) and delusions (bizarre beliefs) are characteristic symptoms of schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses. In order to understand how disturbances in brain function may give rise to these complex symptoms, we require cognitive neuroscientific models of the normal processes that are involved in perception and belief. Existing models treat perception and belief separately, leading to a need for a two-factor theory proposing that both are deranged in schizophrenia. We suggest that recent advances invoking Bayesian theory in cognitive neuroscience offer a way of considering perception and belief as arising from the same process: error-dependent updating in a hierarchical Bayesian structure. Within the framework of this Bayesian model, one can consider both hallucinations and delusions as emerging owing to disruptions in the same updating mechanism, without the need to posit coincident deficits in two separate systems. According to this model, disruptions in prediction-error firing from lower-level systems in the hierarchy require higher-level systems to reject and change inferences in order to accommodate this error signal. At lower levels this may lead to false perceptions but, if it continues, new and more bizarre beliefs will emerge because of a continued sense that the world is not well predicted or modelled by previous beliefs. Hallucinations and delusions are striking features of schizophrenia that have been difficult to explain. Fletcher and Frith discuss cognitive theories of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia and describe how abnormalities in error-dependent learning could underlie both hallucinations and delusions. Advances in cognitive neuroscience offer us new ways to understand the symptoms of mental illness by uniting basic neurochemical and neurophysiological observations with the conscious experiences that characterize these symptoms. Cognitive theories about the positive symptoms of schizophrenia — hallucinations and delusions — have tended to treat perception and belief formation as distinct processes. However, recent advances in computational neuroscience have led us to consider the unusual perceptual experiences of patients and their sometimes bizarre beliefs as part of the same core abnormality — a disturbance in error-dependent updating of inferences and beliefs about the world. We suggest that it is possible to understand these symptoms in terms of a disturbed hierarchical Bayesian framework, without recourse to separate considerations of experience and belief.

Successful decision making in a social setting depends on our ability to understand the intentions, emotions and beliefs of others. The mirror system allows us to understand other people's motor actions and action intentions. 'Empathy' allows us to understand and share emotions and sensations with others. 'Theory of mind' allows us to understand more abstract concepts such as beliefs or wishes in others. In all these cases, evidence has accumulated that we use the specific neural networks engaged in processing mental states in ourselves to understand the same mental states in others. However, the magnitude of the brain activity in these shared networks is modulated by contextual appraisal of the situation or the other person. An important feature of decision making in a social setting concerns the interaction of reason and emotion. We consider four domains where such interactions occur: our sense of fairness, altruistic punishment, trust and framing effects. In these cases, social motivations and emotions compete with each other, while higher-level control processes modulate the interactions of these low-level biases.

Key Points Social cognitive neuroscience is concerned with the representation of the self, the perception of social groups (such as race and gender stereotypes), and the ability to make inferences about the knowledge, beliefs and desires of the self and of others (known as theory of mind). The results of brain imaging studies have implicated a network of brain regions in social cognition, in which the medial prefrontal cortex (including the anterior cingulate cortex) has a special role. Anatomical studies of the medial prefrontal cortex have revealed systematic differences in connectivity along an axis moving from dorsal through rostral to ventral regions around the genu of the corpus callosum. Functional imaging studies have confirmed this distinction, revealing a progression from motor regions to cognitive and emotional regions. Social cognition tasks engage the central region of this axis, the anterior rostral medial frontal cortex (arMFC). The more dorsal region (posterior rostral MFC, prMFC) is involved in action monitoring and the updating of the predicted value of actions, whereas the more ventral region (orbital MFC) is involved in monitoring reward and punishment, and in the updating of the predicted value of outcomes. Activity in the arMFC is elicited by various social cognitive tasks that have in common the need to reflect on mental states of the self or the mental states of others, including both thoughts and feelings. There is a systematic increase in the complexity or abstractness of representations along an axis from the most superior and dorsal region to the most anterior and rostral region of the MFC. Objective properties of states such as pain are represented in the most dorsal region. The prMFC represents subjective properties, which are re-representations of the objective properties of states. Finally, in the arMFC the subjective properties of states are re-represented, creating metacognitive representations that allow us to think about the subjective states of the self and other people. These meta-cognitive representations are necessary for high level social interactions such as those involving trust, in which we need to have not only self-knowledge and knowledge of others, but also reflected self-knowledge (that is, knowledge of what others think about us). The recent convergence of neuroscience and social psychology has shed fresh light on the neural mechanisms underlying social interaction. Amodio and Frith review anatomical and functional characteristics of the medial frontal cortex, highlighting its central role in social cognitive processing. Social interaction is a cornerstone of human life, yet the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition are poorly understood. Recently, research that integrates approaches from neuroscience and social psychology has begun to shed light on these processes, and converging evidence from neuroimaging studies suggests a unique role for the medial frontal cortex. We review the emerging literature that relates social cognition to the medial frontal cortex and, on the basis of anatomical and functional characteristics of this brain region, propose a theoretical model of medial frontal cortical function relevant to different aspects of social cognitive processing.

In everyday life, many people believe that two heads are better than one. Our ability to solve problems together appears to be fundamental to the current dominance and future survival of the human species. But are two heads really better than one? We addressed this question in the context of a collective low-level perceptual decision-making task. For two observers of nearly equal visual sensitivity, two heads were definitely better than one, provided they were given the opportunity to communicate freely, even in the absence of any feedback about decision outcomes. But for observers with very different visual sensitivities, two heads were actually worse than the better one. These seemingly discrepant patterns of group behavior can be explained by a model in which two heads are Bayes optimal under the assumption that individuals accurately communicate their level of confidence on every trial.

Successful social interactions rely upon the abilities of two or more people to mutually exchange information in real-time, while simultaneously adapting to one another. The neural basis of social cognition has mostly been investigated in isolated individuals, and more recently using two-person paradigms to quantify the neuronal dynamics underlying social interaction. While several studies have shown the relevance of understanding complementary and mutually adaptive processes, the neural mechanisms underlying such coordinative behavioral patterns during joint action remain largely unknown. Here, we employed a synchronized finger-tapping task while measuring dual-EEG from pairs of human participants who either mutually adjusted to each other in an interactive task or followed a computer metronome. Neurophysiologically, the interactive condition was characterized by a stronger suppression of alpha and low-beta oscillations over motor and frontal areas in contrast to the non-interactive computer condition. A multivariate analysis of two-brain activity to classify interactive versus non-interactive trials revealed asymmetric patterns of the frontal alpha-suppression in each pair, during both task anticipation and execution, such that only one member showed the frontal component. Analysis of the behavioral data showed that this distinction coincided with the leader–follower relationship in 8/9 pairs, with the leaders characterized by the stronger frontal alpha-suppression. This suggests that leaders invest more resources in prospective planning and control. Hence our results show that the spontaneous emergence of leader–follower relationships in dyadic interactions can be predicted from EEG recordings of brain activity prior to and during interaction. Furthermore, this emphasizes the importance of investigating complementarity in joint action. •Sensorimotor and frontal alpha oscillations suppressed during dyadic interaction•Spontaneous emergence of leader–follower relations during an interactive task•Multivariate decoding of two brains reveals complementary neural mechanisms.•Leaders and followers can be distinguished based on frontal alpha activity.