Abstract
No domain rivals the importance and complexity of our social lives. Given the principle of exaptation in biology — the repurposing of existing structures for new functions — it is likely that brain regions originally evolved to perform computations in one context have been recruited for related computations in other contexts. From this point of view, brain regions for supporting social cognition should also be active in non-social contexts in which the computational demands mirror those of social situations. In this Perspective, we examine the computations required to navigate the social lives of human and non-human primates and identify brain activity patterns responsible for these functions, assessing the degree to which similar activity carries out similar computations in non-social contexts with analogous computational demands. This approach offers a unifying framework that bridges social and non-social domains and has implications for multiple areas within cognitive neuroscience, as well as emerging fields such as human–artificial agent interactions.
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Acknowledgements
M.F.S.R. is funded by Wellcome Trust (grant 221794/Z/20/Z) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC; grant BB/W003392/1).
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Glossary
- Anatomical topography
-
The property that functionally similar neurons are placed near one another.
- Cognitive map
-
A cognitive map in the brain is an internal representation of the relationships among elements in a physical or abstract space, which supports navigation, inference and planning.
- Computational specialization
-
The possibility that brain regions are specialized for one or a limited number of computations.
- Contextual specialization
-
Here, we use this term to refer to the possibility that a brain region only performs a computation in one context, such as a social context, but not in another context, such as a non-social one.
- Exaptation
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An evolutionary process whereby a function originally shaped by evolutionary selection for one role is co-opted to perform another.
- Latent state inference
-
The process of inferring the cause(s) of a person’s observations.
- Prediction network
-
A set of brain regions which continually generate predictions of observations that are expected to occur next. The predictions are updated by comparison with actual sensory inputs.
- Social prediction
-
A key aim for humans and other animals is predicting what is going to happen next; social prediction is the next state that a social situation is expected to take.
- Theory of mind
-
The ability to infer other agents’ mental state.
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Mahmoodi, A., Rushworth, M.F.S. Computational origins of cortical brain circuits for social cognition. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-026-01028-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-026-01028-2
