Regions of our brains making multiple predictions of others' actions.

I want to point to an excellent review and summary by Lin and Wittmann in Trends in Neurosciences of work by Ma et al. in J.Neurosci. (both are open source texts) that deal with the role of evolutionarily younger primate cortical brain regions - such as posterior cingulate cortex and medial preforntal cortex - in social belief inference. Such combined modeling and imaging studies are revealing in greater and greater detail the anatomical correlates of social cognition strategies.  Here is the significance statement from the Ma et al. article:

In daily life, to adjust our decisions, we constantly predict others’ choices, but the inherent uncertainty means we face multiple scenarios for different choices by others. Using computational modeling-based fMRI, we identified a network in three-stage computations for such decision-making. Amygdala signals represent predictions of others’ choices. These signals then interact with the posterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, representing the decision variables with the prediction of others’ likely and unlikely choices, respectively. Finally, these signals modulate the medial prefrontal cortex, influencing our final choices. These pivotal variables and their corresponding brain signals play a fundamental role in a broad range of social cognitive processes. Our findings shed light on underlying mechanisms for complex social interactions in human behavior.