Abstract
Helping a friend move house, donating to charity, volunteering assistance during a crisis. Humans and other species alike regularly undertake prosocial behaviors—actions that benefit others without necessarily helping ourselves. But how does the brain learn what acts are prosocial? Basile and colleagues show that removal of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) prevents monkeys from learning what actions are prosocial but does not stop them carrying out previously learned prosocial behaviors. This highlights that the ability to learn what actions are prosocial and choosing to perform helpful acts may be distinct cognitive processes, with only the former depending on ACC.
Highlights
The aim is to identify brain areas that perform cognitive processes that result in a decision to help others and not just do actions that directly benefit ourselves
Brain imaging studies in humans have measured changes in the blood-oxygen-leveldependent (BOLD) signal—a proxy of neural activity—when people are performing a variety of different tasks that require making predictions or processing rewarding outcomes during social interactions
Future work can address this limitation by making more specific lesions to examine the relative contributions of different subregions to prosocial learning. Another potential avenue for research is to examine whether the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is involved in learning how to be prosocial through vicariously experiencing others’ outcomes or whether its function is about learning social information at a simpler level
Summary
The aim is to identify brain areas that perform cognitive processes that result in a decision to help others and not just do actions that directly benefit ourselves. Brain imaging studies in humans have measured changes in the blood-oxygen-leveldependent (BOLD) signal—a proxy of neural activity—when people are performing a variety of different tasks that require making predictions or processing rewarding outcomes during social interactions.
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