Reply: Towards a neurocomputational account of social dysfunction in neurodegenerative disease

Abstract

We have read the insightful letter by O´Callaghan and Hornberger (2016), wherein they propose a neurocomputational model for recent reports (Melloni et al., 2016;O´Callaghan et al., 2016) of social decision-making impairments in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). To follow up, here we outline a redictive, context-sensitive account of relevant mechanisms in bvFTD and other frontal disorders. First, we reanalyse our data (Melloni et al., 2016) to characterize the neuroanatomical foundation of short-term strategies during social bargaining. Second, we propose a neurocognitive model addressing extant results and motivating predictions for further research on social negotiation. In our study (Melloni et al., 2016), participants played as proposers in a validated repeated version of the ultimatum game, making offers on how to split a sum of money with another player. Such a role brings together self-centred and other-centred processes, as one´s own actions must be riskassessed while predictions are made about the opponent´s upcoming decisions.