792 Converging neural correlates across all individual analyses Moral cognition-, ToM-, and empathy-related brain activ- ity converged in the bilateral TPJ, dmPFC, and right MTG, which therefore form a common network potentially involved in social-cognitive processes. In line with this, metadata proﬁling demonstrates solid associations of this network with neuroimaging studies related to ToM, explicit memory retrieval, language, and imagination of objects/ scenes. Intriguingly, these four seemingly disparate psy- chological categories summarize what sets humans proba- bly apart from non-human primates (Tomasello 2001; Frith and Frith 2010). They might functionally converge in the reciprocal relationship between the allocentric and ego- centric perspective, instructed by self-reﬂection, social knowledge, and memories of past experiences (of social interactions). In particular, autobiographical memory sup- plies numerous building blocks of social semantic knowl- edge (Bar 2007; Binder et al. 2009). These isolated conceptual scripts may be reassembled to enable the fore- casting of future events (Tulving 1983, 1985; Schacter et al. 2007). Similar brain mechanisms in remembering past episodes and envisioning future circumstances is supported by their engagement of identical brain areas, as evidenced by a quantitative meta-analysis (Spreng et al. 2009). Moreover, retrograde amnesic patients were repor- ted to be impaired not only in prospection but also in imagining novel experience (Hassabis et al. 2007). These ﬁndings suggest a single neural network for mentally constructing plausible semantic scenarios of detached sit- uations regardless of temporal orientation (Buckner and Carroll 2007; Hassabis and Maguire 2007). Indeed, con- struction of detached probabilistic scenes has been argued to inﬂuence ongoing decision making by estimating out- comes of behavioral choices (Boyer 2008; Suddendorf and Corballis 2007; Schilbach et al. 2008b). Taken together, moral cognition, ToM, and empathy jointly engage a net- work that might be involved in the automated prediction of social events that modulate behavior. Relation to clinical research Consistent with the demonstrated functional dissociation between cognitive and affective subsystems of the neural network related to moral cognition observed in our study, frontotemporal dementia has been reported to impair per- sonal but not impersonal moral reasoning (Mendez et al. 2005). A cognitive-affective dissociation of moral cognition is also supported clinically by the psychopathic popula- tion’s immoral behavior in everyday life despite excellent moral reasoning skills (Cleckley 1941; Hare 1993). Apart from that, neither Greene’s nor Moll’s concept can 123 Brain Struct Funct (2012) 217:783–796 exhaustively explain why vmPFC patients demonstrated a rationally biased approach to solving moral dilemmas (Koenigs et al. 2007; Moretto et al. 2010), yet, an emo- tionally biased approach to moral cognition in an economic game (Koenigs and Tranel 2007). Given the considerable neural commonalities of moral cognition and ToM tasks as revealed by the present analysis, contradictory ﬁndings of vmPFC patients dealing with moral dilemmas and eco- nomic games (Greene 2007; Koenigs and Tranel 2007; Koenigs et al. 2007) might resolve when meticulously probing ToM capabilities in future lesion studies. Limitations Several limitations of our study should be addressed. Meta- analyses are necessarily based on the available literature and hence may be affected by the potential publication-bias disfavoring results (Rosenthal 1979). This caveat especially applies to the functional characterization of converging activation foci using the BrainMap database, as this database only contains about 21% of the published neuroimaging studies and its content therefore does not constitute a strictly representative sample. Furthermore, a part of the included neuroimaging studies on moral cog- nition might suffer from limited ecological validity. That is, the experimental tasks used might only partially involve the mental processes guiding real-life moral behavior (cf. Cima et al. 2010; Knutson et al. 2010; Young et al. 2010a). In particular, employing overly artiﬁcial moral scenarios (e.g., trolley dilemma), on top of the inherent limitations of neuroimaging paradigms, could have systematically over- estimated cognitive versus emotional processes. This caveat might have contributed to the similar results in the meta-analyses on moral cognition and on ToM (rather than on empathy), given that emotion processing is thought to play a paramount role in real-world moral cognition (Krebs 2008; Tangney et al. 2007; Haidt 2001). Future neuroim- aging studies should therefore strive for using more real- istic moral scenarios to minimize the risk of investigating the neural correlates of ‘‘in vitro moral cognition’’ (cf. Schilbach et al. 2012; Schilbach 2010). Conclusions It is a topic of intense debate whether social cognition is subserved by a unitary specialized module or by a set of general-purpose mental operations (Mitchell 2006; Spreng et al. 2009; Bzdok et al. 2012; Van Overwalle 2011). The present large-scale meta-analysis provides evidence for a domain-global view of moral cognition, rather than for a distinct moral module (Hauser 2006), by showing its