Agency articles from across Nature Portfolio

The ability to recognize an individual and retrieve related information is crucial for social animals. Here, the authors employ a new social recognition paradigm to show that dorsal CA1 neurons distinguish individual mice and encode associated reward information.

In bat CA1, the authors found contextual time cells encoding spatial context and time, another population purely encoding elapsed time and social time cells encoding sequences aligned to another bat’s landing in a social imitation task.

The sense of agency refers to the feeling of controlling one’s own actions and associated external events. In this Review, Wen and Imamizu describe how the sense of agency shapes human perception and behaviour and summarize how the sense of agency is altered in human–machine interactions.

Lee et al. show that in male Shank3-mutant mice, mPFC neurons are impaired in encoding of social agency. Shank3 reexpression in mPFC restored this ability in real time, and this was accompanied by rescue of normal social behavior.

Recordings of cells in the human dorsomedial prefrontal cortex identify a population of neurons that encode information about others’ beliefs and distinguish them from self-belief-related representations, providing insight into cellular-level processing underlying human theory of mind.

How we value our own rewards depends on what others have. A new study shows that neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex selectively monitor the value of rewards received by oneself or by another individual, whereas midbrain dopaminergic neurons integrate these values to generate social subjective reward values.