ABSTRACT
The growing accessibility of methods for neuroimaging the intact, functioning, human brain has led to an explosion of research in cognitive neuroscience in the last 15 years. Combined with the theoretical proposition that parts of the brain may be speci®cally devoted to social perception and cognition (e.g., Brothers, 1990), this has given rise to the new ®eld of social cognitive neuroscience (e.g., Blakemore, Winston & Frith, 2004; Lieberman, 2007), including within it research on mindreading. Curiously, this work has drawn sceptical responses about whether the brain can tell us anything at all about the psychology of mindreading (e.g., Carpendale & Lewis, 2006). I hope to show that this is unduly pessimistic, but I also believe there are good reasons for caution. From a cognitive perspective, most of the informativeness of a functional neuroimaging study depends on having clear hypotheses and good paradigms for testing the cognitive basis of the functions we wish to study. With such tools, patterns of neural activation can be a useful additional dependent variable, which might vary across different conditions even when behavioural measures such as response time and error rate do not. However, since one of my key points in this book is that we are only just developing clear hypotheses and good paradigms for testing the cognitive basis of mindreading, especially in adults, it should not be surprising that I think we have only just begun to see what might be learned from neuroimaging studies.
