Studies in the field of social neuroscience have focused on the neural mechanisms of how we understand and predict the actions, thoughts and feelings of other people (Joiner et al., 2017; Lee and Seo, 2016; Ruff and Fehr, 2014). While subcortical structures may be crucial for understanding valence-related aspects of the social environment such as recognizing emotional facial expressions (Adolphs, 2009), it is often the cortical regions of the brain that have been thought to underlie uniquely human social cognition and that have received comparatively more interest (Saxe, 2006). In particular the cortical network comprising the temporoparietal junction, precuneus and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex has been discussed extensively because of its putative role in inferring of others’ mental states, often referred to as ‘Theory of mind’ (Frith and Frith, 2006; Gallagher and Frith, 2003; Saxe and Kanwisher, 2003; Schurz et al., 2014; Wittmann et al., 2018). The interest in this “social brain” network also increased in light of its anatomical overlap with the brain’s default mode network (Mars et al., 2012).
