ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Teachers recruit mentalizing regions to represent learners' beliefs.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mentalizing and heuristics as distinct cognitive strategies in human teaching.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- A neural signature of adaptive mentalization.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Review
- 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
- Teaching Recombinable Motifs Through Simple Examples.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- A Rapid Cortical Learning Process Supporting Students' Knowledge Construction During Real Classroom Teaching.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Experience and advice consequences shape information sharing strategies.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Teachers recruit mentalizing regions to represent learners' beliefs.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Teaching enables humans to impart vast stores of culturally specific knowledge and skills. However, little is known about the neural computations that guide teachers' decisions about what information to communicate. Participants (N = 28) played the role of teachers while being scanned using fMRI; their task was to select examples that would teach learners how to answer abstract multiple-choice questions. Participants' examples were best described by a model that selects evidence that maximizes the learner's belief in the correct answer. Consistent with this idea, participants' predictions about how well learners would do closely tracked the performance of an independent sample of learners (N = 140) who were tested on the examples they had provided. In addition, regions that play specialized roles in processing social information, namely the bilateral temporoparietal junction and middle and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, tracked learners' posterior belief in the correct answer. Our results shed light on the computational and neural architectures that support our extraordinary abilities as teachers.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.