Contributions of functional neuroimaging to the study of social cognition

ABSTRACT—Increasingly, researchers have been applying the methods of cognitive neuroscience—especially func-tional neuroimaging—to address questions about how humans make inferences about the mental states of others. At the same time, a number of critics have warned against the use of these new techniques by suggesting that func-tional neuroimaging has been unable to provide novel in-sights into the nature of social cognition. Addressing these critiques, this article briefly describes some of the ways in which functional neuroimaging has indeed redirected the study of the social mind, reviewing not only the novel data these techniques have provided but also the ways in which cognitive neuroscience has prompted researchers to con-sider entirely new questions about the organization of human social cognition. Such questions include whether o