Usually, only one person at a time can fit inside an MRI scanner. Thus, it might seem impossible to scan someone's brain during social interaction. But neuroscientists have figured out creative ways around this problem. For example, in one experiment, participants in the scanner were connected to someone in another room through a live video feed, and they played a simple game together. This social interaction led to activation in similar brain regions as those activated in mentalizing studies.
This result could mean that we automatically mentalize whenever we interact with others. However, because the game did not require the players to think about mental states, we cannot be sure that the regions activated during the game were exactly the same regions that the participants use when they mentalize. To clarify this, we designed a new game, in which the players interacted with another person and had to think about mental states.

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Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2019.00101