Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

To learn from an observation, organisms first need to discover the most relevant features that have caused it. This “latent cause discovery” is critical in social settings, where outcomes are achieved by a group of people. Here, we designed a novel task in which participants could learn about the competence of three characters by observing the outcome they achieved in pairs. Therefore, before learning about the characters, participants had to decide which character was more responsible for the outcome. Using computational modelling, univariate and multivariate analysis of human fMRI, and continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) we found that two brain regions were particularly important in solving this task. Activity in hippocampus (HPC) infers the cause of the outcome (i.e., determining the responsible characters), while activity in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) assigns credit to the responsible characters.