ArticleScience advances2021
Reading between the lines: Listener's vmPFC simulates speaker cooperative choices in communication games.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Layers of Social Meaning: Innate, Acquired, and Deliberative Levels of Referential Signal Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Review
- A neurocognitive mechanism for increased cooperation during group formation.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Neurocomputational mechanisms involved in adaptation to fluctuating intentions of others.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Shared intentionality modulates interpersonal neural synchronization at the establishment of communication system.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Neurocomputations of strategic behavior: From iterated to novel interactions.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans have a remarkable ability to understand what is and is not being said by conversational partners. It has been hypothesized that listeners decode the intended meaning of a communicative signal by assuming speakers speak cooperatively, rationally simulating the speaker's choice process and inverting it to recover the speaker's most probable meaning. We investigated whether and how rational simulations of speakers are represented in the listener's brain, by combining referential communication games with functional neuroimaging. We show that listeners' ventromedial prefrontal cortex encodes the probabilistic inference of what a cooperative speaker should say given a communicative goal and context, even when such inferences are irrelevant for reference resolution. The listener's striatum encodes the amount of update on intended meaning, consistent with inverting a simulated mental model. These findings suggest a neural generative mechanism, subserved by the frontal-striatal circuits, that underlies our ability to understand communicative and, more generally, social actions.
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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.