| Summary: | Many daily choices are based on one’s own knowledge. However, when predicting other
people’s behavior, we need to consider the differences between our knowledge and other
people’s presumed knowledge. Social agents need a mechanism to use privileged information
for their own behavior but exclude it from predictions of others. Using fMRI, we investigated
the neural implementation of such social and personal predictions predictions in healthy
human volunteers of both sexes by manipulating privileged and shared information. The
medial frontal cortex appeared to have an important role in flexibly making decisions using
privileged information for oneself or predicting others behavior. Specifically, we show that
ventromedial prefrontal cortex tracked the state of the world independent of the type of
decision (personal, social), whereas dorsomedial regions adjusted their frame of reference to
the use of privileged or shared information. Sampling privileged evidence not available to the
confederate also relied on specific interactions between TPJ and frontal pole.
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