ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Experts in action: why we need an embodied social brain hypothesis.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 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
9 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Animal navigation without mental representation.Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences · 2026Article
- Embodied cognitive evolution and the limits of convergence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The coevolution of cognition and sociality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The fish challenge to vertebrate cognitive evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Social induction and the developmental trajectory of participation in intergroup conflict by vervet monkeys.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- A revitalized biopsychosocial model: core theory, research paradigms, and clinical implications.Psychological medicine · 2023Review
- Coevolution of social and communicative complexity in lemurs.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Neuroscience needs evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Object exploration is facilitated by the physical and social environment in center-based child care.Child developmentArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The anthropoid primates are known for their intense sociality and large brain size. The idea that these might be causally related has given rise to a large body of work testing the 'social brain hypothesis'. Here, the emphasis has been placed on the political demands of social life, and the cognitive skills that would enable animals to track the machinations of other minds in metarepresentational ways. It seems to us that this position risks losing touch with the fact that brains primarily evolved to enable the control of action, which in turn leads us to downplay or neglect the importance of the physical body in a material world full of bodies and other objects. As an alternative, we offer a view of primate brain and social evolution that is grounded in the body and action, rather than minds and metarepresentation. This article is part of the theme issue 'Systems neuroscience through the lens of evolutionary theory'.
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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.