Mentalizing regions and anterior cingulate cortex represent learners’ beliefs during teaching

Abstract

Teaching enables humans to impart vast stores of culturally specific knowledge and skills. However, little is known about the neural computations that guide teachers’ decisions about what information to communicate. Participants (N=28) played the role of teachers while being scanned using fMRI; their task was to select examples that would teach learners how to answer abstract multiple-choice questions. Participants’ examples were best described by a model that selects evidence that maximizes the learner’s belief in the correct answer. Consistent with this idea, participants’ predictions about how well learners would do closely tracked the performance of an independent sample of learners (N=140) who were tested on the examples they had provided. In addition, several regions that play specialized roles in processing social information, including the anterior cingulate gyrus and parts of the mentalizing network, tracked learners’ posterior belief in the correct answer. Our results shed light on the computational and neural architectures that support our extraordinary abilities as teachers.