All ROIs were taken from

t maps corrected at FDR < 0.05, with a cluster threshold of 10 mm3 (10 contiguous voxels). In some cases, the FDR threshold was made more conservative, e.g., when the Small-OTS and Small-LO regions, which each VE-821 concentration have distinct peaks, were connected by voxels with lower t values. If any of the targeted ROIs were not present at FDR < 0.05, the threshold was lowered to FDR < 0.1. If no clear ROI was present at that threshold, then that ROI was not defined for that participant. ROIs were defined as the set of contiguous voxels that were significantly activated around the peak voxel identified from within a restricted part of cortex based on the anatomical position. For all ROI analyses, all ROIs were defined from the Big versus Small object experiment (independent dataset), and the response of these regions to different experimental conditions was assessed in subsequent experiments. For each subject and each ROI, GLMs were run on the average time series of the voxels in the ROI to obtain regression coefficients (betas) for the experimental conditions. For the subsequent experiments with 2 × 2 designs (Experiment 2: retinal size manipulation; Experiment 3: mental imagery), to evaluate the effects of selleck screening library each factor across observers, repeated-measures ANOVAs were run on the betas across observers for each ROI. This work was funded

by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship (to Talia Konkle), Metalloexopeptidase and a National Eye Institute grant EY020484 (to Aude Oliva), and was conducted at the Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center at McGovern

Institute for Brain Research, MIT. We thank George Alvarez, Timothy Brady, Mark Williams, Daniel Dilks, and the reviewers for thoughtful comments on the manuscript. “
“A fundamental human ability in social environments is the simulation of another person’s mental states, or hidden internal variables, to predict their actions and outcomes. Indeed, the ability to simulate another is considered a basic component of mentalizing or theory of mind (Fehr and Camerer, 2007, Frith and Frith, 1999, Gallagher and Frith, 2003 and Sanfey, 2007). However, despite its importance for social cognition, little is known about simulation learning and its cognitive and neural mechanisms. A commonly assumed account of simulation is the direct recruitment of one’s own decision-making process to model the other’s process ( Amodio and Frith, 2006, Buckner and Carroll, 2007 and Mitchell, 2009). The direct recruitment hypothesis predicts that one makes and simulates a model of how the other will act, including the other’s internal variables, as if it is one’s own process, and assumes that this simulated internal valuation process employs the same neural circuitry that one uses for one’s own process.