Meeting of Minds: The medial frontal cortex and social cognition by David M. Amodio & Chris D. Frith (2006). Nature Reviews: Neuroscience, 7, 268-277. Medial Frontal cortex: 3 divisions Orbital (orMFC): BA 14 & 25 Anterior (arMFC): BA 10 & 32 Posterior (prMFC): 24,9 & 8 1

Functional divisions of MFC Social cognition: all the processes that deal with knowledge of the self, perceptions of others including their internal somatic and mental states, and interpersonal motivations Functional divisions of MFC Pr MFC: Action monitoring – link between (voluntary) actions and intentions Ar MFC: Self knowledge, person perception, mentalizing oMFC: Evaluating social consequences of outcomes 2

prMFC: evaluating social consequences of one’s actions Action monitoring and error correction Assessment of actions against desires and goals. Self-selected actions more so than directed ones 3

arMFC: Self knowledge, person perception, mentalizing Evaluation of self-related traits, attributes, preferences related to self Monitoring of one’s emotional state Thinking about others: as others become more familiar activation tends to move more to the front (anterior-orbital) of arMFC Theory of mind: attributing mental states to others; communicative intention (deception) vs. private intention (false belief which is prMFC) 4

Cartoon used to measure ‘mentalizing.’ 5

oMFC: Evaluating social consequences of outcomes Evaluates and prioritizes outcomes of actions Rates reward value of stimuli and responses Deals with outcome itself, monitors actual outcome consequences against anticipated ones. Self-selection less important than prMFC Focus on degree of regret in various outcomes 6

Studies with pain perception suggest that as activation moves more forward pain is less tied to sensory inputs and interpreted more abstractly. Anterior activation also found when making judgments about reputation of other’s and self 7