ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2017
Hierarchical prediction errors in midbrain and septum during social learning.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 69 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
69 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 146 citations in OpenAlex.
- Functional neuroimaging of the human lateral septum: a systematic review of behavioral correlates and anatomical localization.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Pooled it
- Love is analogous to money in human brain: Coordinate-based and functional connectivity meta-analyses of social and monetary reward anticipation.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2019Pooled it
- Dopamine manipulations modulate paranoid social inferences in healthy people.Translational psychiatry · 2020Trial
- Forget-me-some: General versus special purpose models in a hierarchical probabilistic task.PloS one · 2018Trial
- Distinctly structured social behavior across three rodent strains is associated with different neural activity patterns.iScience · 2026Article
- Histamine shapes the neurocomputational dynamics of human learning.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Modeling how autistic and non-autistic groups learn about their own and each other's preferences.Nature. Mental health · 2026Article
- Internal monitoring deficits attenuate post-error slowing in psychosis-proneness.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2026Article
- Depression symptoms relate to altered brain connectivity and behavioral responses during self-referential judgments.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Indecision and recency-weighted evidence integration in non-clinical and clinical settings.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Estimating and learning personality traits of and from women with borderline personality disorder.Borderline personality disorder and emotion dysregulation · 2026Article
- Early electrophysiological responses reflect precision-weighted prediction errors to face features.PloS one · 2026Article
- Neural Dynamics of Social Cognition: A Single-Trial Computational Analysis of Learning Under Uncertainty.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Neurocomputational basis of learning when choices simultaneously affect both oneself and others.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions disrupt learning to reward others.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2025Article
- Dissecting how psychopathic traits are linked to learning in different contexts: A multilevel computational and electrophysiological approach.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- The role of affective states in computational psychiatry.The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Review
- Exploring when to exploit: the cognitive underpinnings of foraging-type decisions in relation to psychopathy.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Now is the time: operationalizing generative neurophenomenology through interpersonal methods.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Neurocomputational mechanisms involved in adaptation to fluctuating intentions of others.Nature communications · 2024Article
9 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 5 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social learning is fundamental to human interactions, yet its computational and physiological mechanisms are not well understood. One prominent open question concerns the role of neuromodulatory transmitters. We combined fMRI, computational modelling and genetics to address this question in two separate samples (N = 35, N = 47). Participants played a game requiring inference on an adviser's intentions whose motivation to help or mislead changed over time. Our analyses suggest that hierarchically structured belief updates about current advice validity and the adviser's trustworthiness, respectively, depend on different neuromodulatory systems. Low-level prediction errors (PEs) about advice accuracy not only activated regions known to support 'theory of mind', but also the dopaminergic midbrain. Furthermore, PE responses in ventral striatum were influenced by the Met/Val polymorphism of the Catechol-O-Methyltransferase (COMT) gene. By contrast, high-level PEs ('expected uncertainty') about the adviser's fidelity activated the cholinergic septum. These findings, replicated in both samples, have important implications: They suggest that social learning rests on hierarchically related PEs encoded by midbrain and septum activity, respectively, in the same manner as other forms of learning under volatility. Furthermore, these hierarchical PEs may be broadcast by dopaminergic and cholinergic projections to induce plasticity specifically in cortical areas known to represent beliefs about others.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.