There is a growing consensus that social cognition and behavior emerge from interactions across distributed regions of the “social brain”. Researchers have traditionally focused their attention on functional response properties of these gray matter networks and neglected the vital role of white matter connections in establishing such networks and their functions. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive review of prior research on structural connectivity in social neuroscience and highlight the importance of this literature in clarifying brain mechanisms of social cognition. We pay particular attention to three key social processes: face processing, embodied cognition, and theory of mind, and their respective underlying neural networks. To fully identify and characterize the anatomical architecture of these networks, we further implement probabilistic tractography on a large sample of diffusion-weighted imaging data. The combination of an in-depth literature review and the empirical investigation gives us an unprecedented, well-defined landscape of white matter pathways underlying major social brain networks. Finally, we discuss current problems in the field, outline suggestions for best practice in diffusion-imaging data collection and analysis, and offer new directions for future research.

人们越来越认识到，社会认知和行为是由“社会大脑”的分布式区域的相互作用产生的。研究人员传统上将注意力集中在这些灰质网络的功能反应特性上，而忽略了白质连接在建立此类网络及其功能中的重要作用。在本文中，我们对社会神经科学中结构连接的先前研究进行了全面回顾，并强调了这些文献在阐明社会认知的大脑机制方面的重要性。我们特别关注三个关键的社会过程：面部处理、具身认知和心理理论，以及它们各自的底层神经网络。为了充分识别和表征这些网络的解剖结构，我们进一步对大量扩散加权成像数据样本实施概率纤维束成像。深入的文献综述和实证研究的结合为我们提供了一个前所未有的、明确的主要社交大脑网络背后的白质通路图景。最后，我们讨论了该领域当前的问题，概述了扩散成像数据收集和分析最佳实践的建议，并为未来的研究提供了新的方向。