Humans use forward thinking to exploit social controllability

Na, S; Chung, D; Hula, A; Perl, O; Jung, J; Heflin, M; Blackmore , S; Fiore, VG; Dayan, P; Gu, X

doi:10.7554/eLife.64983

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Humans use forward thinking to exploit social controllability

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Dayan, P
Department of Computational Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Max Planck Society;
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Max Planck Society;

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https://elifesciences.org/articles/64983
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Citation

Na, S., Chung, D., Hula, A., Perl, O., Jung, J., Heflin, M., et al. (2021). Humans use forward thinking to exploit social controllability. eLife, 10, 1-23. doi:10.7554/eLife.64983.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0009-6D87-5

Abstract

The controllability of our social environment has a profound impact on our behavior and mental health. Nevertheless, neurocomputational mechanisms underlying social controllability remain elusive. Here, 48 participants performed a task where their current choices either did (Controllable), or did not (Uncontrollable), influence partners' future proposals. Computational modeling revealed that people engaged a mental model of forward thinking (FT; i.e., calculating the downstream effects of current actions) to estimate social controllability in both Controllable and Uncontrollable conditions. A large-scale online replication study (n=1342) supported this finding. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (n=48), we further demonstrated that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) computed the projected total values of current actions during forward planning, supporting the neural realization of the forward-thinking model. These findings demonstrate that humans use vmPFC-dependent FT to estimate and exploit social controllability, expanding the role of this neurocomputational mechanism beyond spatial and cognitive contexts.