Summary: New research from the University of Pennsylvania shows that the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC)—a brain region commonly linked to understanding others—is more responsive to uncertainty than to social content itself. Functional MRI (fMRI) scans indicate that DMPFC activation increases when people face uncertain inferences across domains, including other people’s minds, human bodies, and inanimate objects. These results challenge the view that the DMPFC is uniquely specialized for social cognition and suggest a reframing of some atypical social behaviors as differences in how uncertainty is processed.
Imagine preparing to confront a friend about a hurtful comment and trying to predict how she will react. You might expect an apology, defensiveness, or a critical response. That effort to infer someone’s beliefs, intentions, or emotions is often called mentalizing. The dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) is a core node of the brain’s so-called mentalizing network and has been repeatedly implicated in tasks that require thinking about other minds.
Previous studies reported stronger DMPFC engagement during social inferences than during non-social judgments—for example, comparing assessments about people with judgments about objects or physical traits. However, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania identified a crucial confound in those interpretations: uncertainty. Their findings indicate that elevated uncertainty, which frequently accompanies social judgments, may drive DMPFC activation rather than social content per se.
In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the team scanned 46 participants using fMRI while they made inferences in three domains: human minds (mental states), human bodies (physical traits), and physical objects. Crucially, they varied the level of uncertainty within each domain to determine whether DMPFC activity tracked domain-specific social content or the degree of uncertainty involved in the judgment.
Before scanning, the researchers conducted an online pilot to quantify uncertainty. Participants rated how informative one characteristic was for predicting another on a scale from 1 to 100. During the fMRI sessions, participants judged how likely one characteristic described the same person, body, or object as another—for example, whether someone described as compassionate was likely to be sincere, or whether a redheaded person was likely to be short, or whether a piece of furniture with one quality would share another quality.
Across all three categories, greater uncertainty predicted stronger DMPFC engagement. When statistical models accounted for uncertainty, DMPFC activity no longer reliably distinguished mental (social) from nonmental (nonsocial) inferences. In other words, DMPFC activation appears to reflect the effort of resolving uncertain inferences rather than being selectively tuned to social content.
These results have important implications for understanding conditions characterized by atypical social cognition, such as autism spectrum disorder and social anxiety. The study authors note that autistic individuals often perform similarly to neurotypical people on nonsocial tasks yet show differences on social tasks; they also frequently report higher intolerance of uncertainty. Reframing some social difficulties as differences in intolerance of, or strategies for handling, uncertainty could open new avenues for research and intervention.
“Our work points to uncertainty as an important factor that might help explain differences in how people think and behave in social compared to nonsocial contexts,” says senior author Adrianna (Anna) Jenkins, associate professor of psychology in the School of Arts & Sciences. First author Dilara Berkay adds that interpreting DMPFC activation as a response to uncertainty helps reconcile prior findings that appeared to show selective social processing in this region.
The authors emphasize that their study focused specifically on uncertainty about people and objects. Whether the DMPFC responds similarly to other forms of uncertainty—such as ambiguity about events, rules, or abstract outcomes—remains an open question for future research. Their next steps include characterizing different kinds of uncertainty (for example, reducible versus irreducible uncertainty), mapping how these varieties relate to DMPFC activation, and examining how individual differences shape strategies for uncertainty reduction.
Future work will also explore which kinds of uncertainty are most common or impactful in daily life, whether particular populations encounter certain uncertainties more frequently, and how people deploy different strategies to manage uncertainty in social and nonsocial contexts. Better understanding these dynamics could inform targeted supports and therapeutic approaches for individuals whose social challenges stem in part from how they process uncertainty.
Adrianna (Anna) Jenkins is an associate professor of psychology in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Dilara Berkay is a postdoctoral fellow in the Jenkins Lab at Penn Arts & Sciences. This research was supported by the University of Pennsylvania University Research Foundation.
About this social neuroscience research news
Author: Dilara Berkay
Source: University of Pennsylvania
Contact: Dilara Berkay – University of Pennsylvania
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access. “Uncertainty, Not Mental Content, Drives Dorsomedial Prefrontal Engagement during Inferences about Others” by Dilara Berkay et al., Journal of Neuroscience.
Abstract
Uncertainty, Not Mental Content, Drives Dorsomedial Prefrontal Engagement during Inferences about Others
To navigate social life, humans infer intentions, beliefs, emotions, and personalities of others—an ability often called mentalizing. A network of brain regions typically shows greater engagement during mentalizing than during controlled comparison tasks, a pattern sometimes interpreted as evidence for domain-specific social processing.
We examined whether engagement of these regions, and of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) in particular, might instead reflect sensitivity to uncertainty. We scanned 46 participants (33 female, 13 male) using fMRI as they made inferences about human minds, human bodies, and physical objects under varying levels of uncertainty. Across conditions, higher uncertainty was associated with greater DMPFC activity. When controlling for uncertainty, DMPFC engagement did not reliably differentiate mental from non-mental inferences. These results suggest that apparent selectivity of the DMPFC for social inference may be better understood as a response to uncertainty, with implications for models of the social brain and for disorders of social function.