# Project 1 - The Neurobiology of Social Decision-Making: Social Inference and Context

> **NIH NIH P50** · CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY · 2021 · $346,677

## Abstract

Project 1. Project Summary.
This Project 1, directed by John O'Doherty, is a renewal of Project 2 in our current Conte Center. It aims to
continue our investigation of how we can learn to make decisions by observing the choices of another person.
This ability, observational learning, is present behaviorally in several species and likely constitutes the main
mechanism for the acquisition of social decision-making skills in humans. However, compared to the systems
we now know to mediate direct learning through personal experience, surprisingly little is known about the
systems that mediate observational learning. What systems are there? How are they differentially employed
depending on the context? How might this vary across individuals? We will address these questions across
four Aims that test the engagement of three postulated neural systems for observational learning.
 Of specific interest is a system that relies on social inference, the focus theme of this Conte Center.
This system, which is thought to recruit sectors of medial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction,
mediates a computationally more powerful and flexible form of observational learning that requires imputing
hidden states to people to explain their actions: their values, goals, and beliefs. We hypothesize, and will test,
that this is the same social inference system that is engaged in standard social neuroscience tasks, such as
the “why/how” task administered to all participants under Core 2 and investigated explicitly in Project 2. This
Project 1 also links to an Aim that is described under Project 4, where we will investigate the single-unit
correlates of observational learning. The strong links between this Project and several others are reflected in
its personnel, which include PIs from other Projects (Mobbs, Andersen, Rutishauser, Hutcherson) and post-
docs shared with other Projects.
 The primary approach of Project 1 uses computational fMRI, which designs fMRI tasks such that
regional brain activation can be fit to the parameters in a model of the observational learning process. It will
test 50 healthy participants in each of 6 experiments, recruited through Cores 2 and 3, and shared in part with
the participants of Projects 2 and 3. Its Aims will test how attention to specific features of social stimuli
engages different systems, how social context matters (e.g., if we are observing a human or a computer), how
the reliability of the different systems may influence arbitration amongst them, and to what extent there are
individual differences that correlate with psychological assessment scores from Core 3, or results from
experiments that shared overlapping subjects in other Projects.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10101672
- **Project number:** 5P50MH094258-10
- **Recipient organization:** CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
- **Principal Investigator:** JOHN P O'DOHERTY
- **Activity code:** P50 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $346,677
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2012-07-26 → 2023-02-28

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10101672

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10101672, Project 1 - The Neurobiology of Social Decision-Making: Social Inference and Context (5P50MH094258-10). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10101672. Licensed CC0.

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