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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. Cartoon used to measure ‘mentalizing.’5

6. 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

7. 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