One of the overarching cognitive neuroscience interests of our lab is the architecture of social knowledge. Social knowledge is operationally defined here as one's "knowledge about socio-cultural norms and the needs of others". It thereby provides the basis for moral motivations (defined as being motivated to act according to socio-cultural norms or needs of others, Zahn, Oliveira-Souza, Moll, in Handbook of Social Neuroscience 2011).
These definitions of social knowledge and moral motivation mainly describe their function and are therefore as free as possible of theoretical assumptions about the underlying cognitive and neuroanatomical architecture. Our most updated model has been published in 2020 .
Underlying our research on the cognitive-anatomical architecture of social knowledge and moral motivations is the depicted model of components.