Meeting of minds: the medial frontal cortex and social cognition

By David M. Amodio, ChrisD . Frith. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2006

3,759 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42d6aa17ce3a64333a99f1643f881ab7519c721a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Citations in the corpus

Self-Awareness Part 1: Definition, Measures, Effects, Functions, and Antecedents (2011, background): “These deficits are increasingly being associated with brain dysfunction, most probably located in the more anterior region of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (Amodio & Frith, 2006).”
Functional-Anatomic Fractionation of the Brain's Default Network (2010, background): “…the dMPFC subsystem are also activated when participants infer the mental states of other people (e.g., Gallagher et al., 2000; Saxe and Kanwisher, 2003; Saxe et al., 2006; Ochsner et al., 2005; Lombardo et al., 2009; reviewed in Frith and Frith, 2003; Ochsner et al., 2004; Amodio and Frith, 2006).”
Functional Causal Mediation Analysis With an Application to Brain Connectivity (2012, background): “In addition to responding to physical pain, the anterior insula has been shown to be activated by viewing others in pain, receiving an unfair offer in an economic game, or viewing aversive pictures (Amodio and Frith 2006; Wager et al. 2008).”
Saliency, switching, attention and control: a network model of insula function (2010, unknown): “…and self-referential processes (Buckner and Carroll 2007); the VMPFC is associated with social cognitive processes related to self and others (Amodio and Frith 2006); the MTL is engaged in episodic and autobiographical memory (Cabeza et al. 2004), and the angular gyrus is implicated in…”
Neural correlates of mentalizing-related computations during strategic interactions in humans (2008, background): “This ability is often referred to as ‘‘mentalizing’’ and has been linked to a number of specific regions thought to be specifically engaged when processing socially relevant stimuli, and especially when inferring the state of minds of others (1).”
Organisation of executive functions: Hemispheric asymmetries (2012, background): “Other authors have proposed similar gradients in social cognition, with increasing abstractness and complexity from posterior to anterior medial prefrontal regions (Amodio & Frith, 2006).”
The development of emotion regulation: an fMRI study of cognitive reappraisal in children, adolescents and young adults. (2012, background): “…others, which underlies many complex social cognitive abilities, such as self-referential judgments, mentalizing, perspective taking and empathy (Amodio and Frith, 2006; Frith and Frith, 2006; Singer, 2006; Lieberman, 2007; Olson et al., 2007; Olsson and Ochsner, 2008; Adolphs, 2009; Carrington…”
Counterfactual Choice and Learning in a Neural Network Centered on Human Lateral Frontopolar Cortex (2011, background): “In the social domain, two recent investigations [15,21] have revealed signed prediction error responses in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC)—brain regions implicated in theory of mind tasks [52,53]—when participants have to learn about the behavior of anoth”
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Moral Judgment (2010, background): “The aforementioned regions are implicated in emotional processing (Maddock, 1999; Phan et al., 2002; Adolphs, 2003) as well as in “theory of mind” (ToM) (Frith, 2001; Adolphs, 2003; Amodio and Frith, 2006; Young et al., 2007).”
Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance (2010, unknown): “In their review on this subject, Amodio and Frith (2006) noted that representations of low-level goals and actions tend to be associated with activity in more posterior and ventral regions of the mPFC, whereas more complex and hierarchically organized representations are typically associated with…”
Neural correlates of heart rate variability during emotion (2009, methodology): “Our current results suggest that rostral ACC is involved in coordinating the autonomic adjustments associated with maintaining a self-focused mental state that may but need not include emotion (Amodio and Frith, 2006).”
Affective Neuroscience: Past, Present, and Future (2009, background): “The mPFC has also been implicated in person perception, mentalizing, and outcome monitoring (Amodio & Frith, 2006).”
Political Neuroscience: The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship (2014, background): “As hypothesized , brain regions associated with mentalizing—including the medial prefrontal cortex and temporopari - etal junction ( Adolphs , 2009 ; Amodio & Frith , 2006 ; Mitchell et al .”