A third network concerned with “empathy” is engaged when individuals experience vicarious emotions from observing others PFI-2 ic50 ( de Vignemont and Singer, 2006). Finally, a fourth, “mirror,” network is activated when individuals observe the actions of others and is thought to play a role in learning through observation ( Carr et al., 2003, Rizzolatti and Craighero, 2004 and Spunt and Lieberman, 2012). The empathy and mirror networks are clearly related, and the mentalizing and mirror networks have in fact been combined into more global schemes for a unified model of how we think about other people ( Keysers and Gazzola, 2007). However, there is certainly not unanimous agreement on precisely what the

networks are, on their composition, or on how best to study them ( Barrett and Satpute, 2013). Indeed, it is likely that current beliefs about network architecture are biased, at least in part, by pre-existing theoretical Lapatinib cell line divisions and distinctions in social psychology—as well as limited by data. An alternative data-driven approach that is less biased capitalizes on data mining of the literature to find relationships between the psychological concepts studied and the brain activation patterns

that emerge over several thousand publications (Table 1; Figure 2C) (Yarkoni et al., 2011). Networks derived from these data-driven approaches will need to be compared and combined in some way with networks obtained from specific social neuroscience studies that use concepts from social psychology, as well as with networks obtained from model-based approaches. Yet even a cursory exploration with a data-driven approach (using NeuroSynth, see Figure 2C) yields both a confirmation of known patterns (e.g., several regions, such as medial prefrontal cortex and precuneus, feature in social cognition networks) as well as the discovery of new ones that can be further tested (e.g., the amygdala appears to participate

in many social cognition processes but not mentalizing). The future approach we advocate uses such data mining not as the sole tool but precisely to test results against Fossariinae patterns in the literature and to motivate new hypotheses to be further tested with other approaches (cf. Table 1). One looming question regarding the concept of the “social brain” and its modern network versions is whether any of these networks are specialized for processing social information. Plausibly, all social cognition draws on entirely domain-general processes, only applied to social stimuli. This unresolved question has been discussed in detail before (e.g., Adolphs, 2010) with the recommendation that, for methodological reasons, we should assume the existence of such specialized processes and brain networks (e.g., Kennedy and Adolphs, 2012). This assumption may in time be proved wrong, or wrong for some of the networks (e.g.