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Humans use forward thinking to exploit social controllability.

Soojung Na1,2,3, Dongil Chung4, Andreas Hula5

  • 1The Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, United States.

Elife
|October 29, 2021
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Humans use forward thinking (FT) to understand social control, even when actions don't matter. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is key to this process, calculating future outcomes to assess social environments.

Keywords:
computational modelingcontrollabilityforward thinkinghumanmodel-based planningneurosciencesocial decision-makingvmPFC

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Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Cognitive Science
  • Social Psychology

Background:

  • Social environment controllability significantly impacts behavior and mental health.
  • Neurocomputational underpinnings of social controllability are not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the neurocomputational mechanisms enabling the estimation and exploitation of social controllability.
  • To determine the role of forward thinking (FT) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in social decision-making.

Main Methods:

  • Participants engaged in a task manipulating choice influence on partners' proposals (Controllable vs. Uncontrollable).
  • Computational modeling was used to analyze decision-making strategies.
  • Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) examined brain activity during the task.
  • A large-scale online replication study validated initial findings.

Main Results:

  • Individuals employed a forward thinking (FT) mental model to estimate social controllability, irrespective of actual control.
  • The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) was identified as a critical neural substrate, calculating projected action values during forward planning.
  • Replication studies confirmed the prevalence of FT in assessing social controllability.

Conclusions:

  • Humans utilize vmPFC-dependent forward thinking (FT) to estimate and leverage social controllability.
  • This research expands the known functions of FT and vmPFC beyond spatial and cognitive domains into social contexts.