Learning about the world is critical to survival and success. In social animals, learning about others is a necessary component of navigating the social world, ultimately contributing to increasing evolutionary fitness. How humans and nonhuman animals represent the internal states and experiences of others has long been a subject of intense interest in the developmental psychology tradition, and, more recently, in studies of learning and decision making involving self and other. In this review, we explore how psychology conceptualizes the process of representing others, and how neuroscience has uncovered correlates of reinforcement learning signals to explore the neural mechanisms underlying social learning from the perspective of representing reward-related information about self and other. In particular, we discuss self-referenced and other-referenced types of reward prediction errors across multiple brain structures that effectively allow reinforcement learning algorithms to mediate social learning. Predictionbased computational principles in the brain may be strikingly conserved between self-referenced and other-referenced information.npj Science of Learning (2017) 2:8 ; doi:10.1038/s41539-017-0009-2 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON REPRESENTING OTHERLearning about the world and making adaptive decisions is a critical feature of cognition. This important link allows human and nonhuman animals to manipulate their environment and survive. Decision-making takes on more complex dynamics when an animal is not solitary, but lives in a community with other members of its own species. We know much about how human and nonhuman animals learn from their own actions and outcomes, and where such self-referenced information is represented in the brain. However, much less is known about the computations underlying how we learn about others. In this review, we examine the presence of other-referenced prediction errors in the brain that represent other's actions and reward outcomes.One of the first academic disciplines to attempt to understand how we develop a concept of others is developmental psychology, in which researchers often explore how babies come to understand the world.

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