790 Brain Struct Funct (2012) 217:783–796 Fig. 3 Functional characterization of the core-network implicated in moral cognition, theory of mind (ToM), and empathy. Left neural network consistently activated across individual meta-analyses on moral cognition, ToM, and empathy (extent threshold: k = 10 voxels to exclude presumably incidental results). Images were rendered using Mango (multi-image analysis GUI, Research Imaging Institute, San Antonio, Texas, USA; http://ric.uthscsa.edu/mango/). Right functional characterization of the convergent network across all three tasks by BrainMap metadata. The purple bars denote the number of Converging neural correlates across moral cognition and theory of mind Brain activity during moral cognition and ToM overlapped in the bilateral vmPFC/FP/dmPFC and TPJ, as well as the right TP and MTG. This extensive convergence indicates that moral cognition and ToM engage a highly similar neural network, which, in turn, entices to speculate about a close relationship between these two psychological processes. More speciﬁcally, increased activity along the dorso-ventral axis of the medial prefrontal cortex is heterogeneously discussed to reﬂect cognitive versus affective processes (Shamay-Tsoory et al. 2006), controlled/explicit versus automatic/implicit social cognition (Lieberman 2007; For- bes and Grafman 2010), goal versus outcome pathways (Krueger et al. 2009), dissimilarity versus similarity to self (Mitchell et al. 2006) as well as other-focus versus self-focus (Van Overwalle 2009). Apart from that, the spatially largest convergence across moral cognition- and ToM-related brain activity in the bilateral posterior temporal lobe/angular gyrus might be surprising given the divergent interpretation in the literature. That is, activation in this cortical region is con- ventionally interpreted as ‘‘posterior superior temporal sul- cus’’ in the morality literature (Moll et al. 2005b; Greene and 123 foci for that particular metadata class within the seed network. The grey bars represent the number of foci that would be expected to hit the particular seed network if all foci with the respective class were randomly distributed throughout the cerebral cortex. That is, the grey bars denote the by-chance frequency of that particular label given the size of the cluster. All shown taxonomic classes reached signiﬁcance according to a binomial test (p \ 0.05). Asterisks denote classes that survived the Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons Haidt 2002) and as ‘‘temporo-parietal junction’’ in the ToM literature (Decety and Lamm 2007; Van Overwalle 2009; Saxe and Kanwisher 2003). This convergent activation in the ALE on moral cognition is, however, more accurately located to the TPJ, rather than to the pSTS (cf. Raine and Yang 2006; Binder et al. 2009). The potentially inconsistent neuroanatomical labeling might have disadvantageously affected discussion of this brain area in previous neuroim- aging studies on moral cognition. The engagement of ToM-associated areas during moral cognition has also been addressed in several recent fMRI studies by Young, Saxe, and colleagues. These authors proposed that during moral cognition, the dmPFC might process belief valence, while the TPJ and Prec might encode and integrate beliefs with other relevant features (Young and Saxe 2008). Especially, brain activity in the right TPJ was advocated to reﬂect belief processing during moral cognition. This argument was based on interaction effects with moral reasoning (Young et al. 2007), correla- tion with the participants’ self-reported tendency for acknowledging belief information (Young and Saxe 2009), and a signiﬁcantly reduced impact of intentions after transient TPJ disruption (Young et al. 2010b). In line with our results, these fMRI studies suggest that moral cognition