Towards a neurocomputational account of social dysfunction in neurodegenerative disease.

Sir, We were excited by the recent findings of Melloni and colleagues (2016) showing preserved immediate responses to offers during a social bargaining task in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and frontal lesion patients. In contrast, deficits emerged at the more complex level of social bargaining requiring successful integration of self and others’ preferences. Our study published earlier this year in Brain echoed this dissociation: bvFTD patients retained basic fairness judgements during social bargaining, but failed to adjust their behaviour to accommodate additional information about another’s perspective (O’Callaghan et al. , 2016). Together these emphasize intact self-preferences with impaired ability to integrate others’ perspectives. But how do the observed dissociations in both studies …