Is There a ‘Social’ Brain? Implementations and Algorithms

A fundamental question in psychology and neuroscience is the extent to which cognitive and neural processes are specialized for social behaviour, or shared with other ‘non-social’ cognitive, perceptual and motor faculties. Here we apply the influential framework of Marr (1982) across research in humans, monkeys, and rodents to propose that whether information processing is ‘social’ or ‘non-social’ can be understood at different levels. We argue that processes can be socially specialised at the implementational and/or the algorithmic level, and that changing the goal of social behaviour can also change social specificity. This framework could provide important new insights into the nature of social behaviour across species, facilitate greater integration and inspire novel theoretical and empirical approaches