Mechanisms of social cognition Frith, Chris D; Frith, Uta
Annual review of psychology,
01/2012, Letnik:
63
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Social animals including humans share a range of social mechanisms that are automatic and implicit and enable learning by observation. Learning from others includes imitation of actions and mirroring ...of emotions. Learning about others, such as their group membership and reputation, is crucial for social interactions that depend on trust. For accurate prediction of others' changeable dispositions, mentalizing is required, i.e., tracking of intentions, desires, and beliefs. Implicit mentalizing is present in infants less than one year old as well as in some nonhuman species. Explicit mentalizing is a meta-cognitive process and enhances the ability to learn about the world through self-monitoring and reflection, and may be uniquely human. Meta-cognitive processes can also exert control over automatic behavior, for instance, when short-term gains oppose long-term aims or when selfish and prosocial interests collide. We suggest that they also underlie the ability to explicitly share experiences with other agents, as in reflective discussion and teaching. These are key in increasing the accuracy of the models of the world that we construct.
We present a framework for discussing two major aspects of social cognition: the ability to predict what another person is like and what another person is likely to do next. In the first part of this ...review, we discuss studies that concern knowledge of others as members of a group and as individuals with habitual dispositions. These include studies of group stereotypes and of individual reputation, derived either from experience in reciprocal social interactions such as economic games or from indirect observation and cultural information. In the second part of the review, we focus on processes that underlie our knowledge about actions, intentions, feelings and beliefs. We discuss studies on the ability to predict the course of motor actions and of the intentions behind actions. We also consider studies of contagion and sharing of feelings. Lastly, we discuss studies of spatial and mental perspective taking and the importance of the perception of communicative intent. In the final section of this review, we suggest that the distinction between top–down and bottom–up processes, originally applied to non-social cognitive functions, is highly relevant to social processes. While social stimuli automatically elicit responses via bottom–up processes, responses to the same stimuli can be modulated by explicit instructions via top–down processes. In this way, they provide an escape from the tyranny of strong emotions that are readily aroused in social interactions.
Dyslexia: Cultural Diversity and Biological Unity Paulesu, E.; J.-F. Démonet; Fazio, F. ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
03/2001, Letnik:
291, Številka:
5511
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The recognition of dyslexia as a neurodevelopmental disorder has been hampered by the belief that it is not a specific diagnostic entity because it has variable and culture-specific manifestations. ...In line with this belief, we found that Italian dyslexics, using a shallow orthography which facilitates reading, performed better on reading tasks than did English and French dyslexics. However, all dyslexics were equally impaired relative to their controls on reading and phonological tasks. Positron emission tomography scans during explicit and implicit reading showed the same reduced activity in a region of the left hemisphere in dyslexics from all three countries, with the maximum peak in the middle temporal gyrus and additional peaks in the inferior and superior temporal gyri and middle occipital gyrus. We conclude that there is a universal neurocognitive basis for dyslexia and that differences in reading performance among dyslexics of different countries are due to different orthographies.
Interacting Minds-A Biological Basis Frith, Chris D.; Frith, Uta
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
11/1999, Letnik:
286, Številka:
5445
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The ability to "mentalize," that is to understand and manipulate other people's behavior in terms of their mental states, is a major ingredient in successful social interactions. A rudimentary form ...of this ability may be seen in great apes, but in humans it is developed to a high Level. Specific impairments of mentalizing in both developmental and acquired disorders suggest that this ability depends on a dedicated and circumscribed brain system. Functional imaging studies implicate medial prefrontal cortex and posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) as components of this system. Clues to the specific function of these components in mentalizing come from single cell recording studies: STS is concerned with representing the actions of others through the detection of biological motion; medial prefrontal regions are concerned with explicit representation of states of the self. These observations suggest that the ability to mentalize has evolved from a system for representing actions.
Over the last 2 decades, a large number of neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies of patients with schizophrenia have furnished in vivo evidence for dysconnectivity, ie, abnormal functional ...integration of brain processes. While the evidence for dysconnectivity in schizophrenia is strong, its etiology, pathophysiological mechanisms, and significance for clinical symptoms are unclear. First, dysconnectivity could result from aberrant wiring of connections during development, from aberrant synaptic plasticity, or from both. Second, it is not clear how schizophrenic symptoms can be understood mechanistically as a consequence of dysconnectivity. Third, if dysconnectivity is the primary pathophysiology, and not just an epiphenomenon, then it should provide a mechanistic explanation for known empirical facts about schizophrenia. This article addresses these 3 issues in the framework of the dysconnection hypothesis. This theory postulates that the core pathology in schizophrenia resides in aberrant N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR)-mediated synaptic plasticity due to abnormal regulation of NMDARs by neuromodulatory transmitters like dopamine, serotonin, or acetylcholine. We argue that this neurobiological mechanism can explain failures of self-monitoring, leading to a mechanistic explanation for first-rank symptoms as pathognomonic features of schizophrenia, and may provide a basis for future diagnostic classifications with physiologically defined patient subgroups. Finally, we test the explanatory power of our theory against a list of empirical facts about schizophrenia.
The present study is aimed at identifying the neural correlates of two kinds of attribution: experiencing oneself as the cause of an action (the sense of agency) or experiencing another person as ...being the cause of that action. The experimental conditions were chosen so that they differed only in their requirement to attribute an action to another person or to oneself. The same motor task and the same visual stimuli were used in the experimental conditions. Subjects used a joystick to drive a circle along a T-shaped path. They were told that the circle would be driven either by themselves or by the experimenter. In the former case subjects were requested to drive the circle, to be aware that they drove the circle, and thus to mentally attribute the action seen on the screen to themselves. In the latter case they were also requested to perform the task, but they were aware that action seen on the screen was driven by the experimenter. In accord with previous studies, the results showed that being aware of causing an action was associated with activation in the anterior insula, whereas being aware of not causing the action and attributing it to another person was associated with activation in the inferior parietal cortex. These two regions are involved in the perception of complex representations of the self and of its interactions with the external world. We suggest that the anterior insula is concerned with the integration of all the concordant multimodal sensory signals associated with voluntary movements. The inferior parietal cortex, in contrast, represents movements in an allocentric coding system that can be applied to the actions of others as well as the self.
Previous functional imaging studies have explored the brain regions activated by tasks requiring ‘theory of mind’—the attribution of mental states. Tasks used have been primarily verbal, and it has ...been unclear to what extent different results have reflected different tasks, scanning techniques, or genuinely distinct regions of activation. Here we report results from a functional magnetic resonance imaging study (fMRI) involving two rather different tasks both designed to tap theory of mind. Brain activation during the theory of mind condition of a story task and a cartoon task showed considerable overlap, specifically in the medial prefrontal cortex (paracingulate cortex). These results are discussed in relation to the cognitive mechanisms underpinning our everyday ability to ‘mind-read’.
A sudden touch on one hand can improve vision near that hand, revealing crossmodal links in spatial attention. It is often assumed that such links involve only multimodal neural structures, but ...unimodal brain areas may also be affected. We tested the effect of simultaneous visuo-tactile stimulation on the activity of the human visual cortex. Tactile stimulation enhanced activity in the visual cortex, but only when it was on the same side as a visual target. Analysis of effective connectivity between brain areas suggests that touch influences unimodal visual cortex via back-projections from multimodal parietal areas. This provides a neural explanation for crossmodal links in spatial attention.
Alignment in social interactions Gallotti, M.; Fairhurst, M.T.; Frith, C.D.
Consciousness and cognition,
February 2017, 2017-02-00, 20170201, Letnik:
48
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
•A new approach to social cognition in terms of mental alignment is proposed.•The dynamic and graded exchange of information between agents creates alignment.•Not all forms of joint action in which ...the agents align will turn out to be social interactions.•Shared goals are not needed for mutual alignment to occur.•Two important theoretical developments follow from focusing on processes of mental alignment.
According to the prevailing paradigm in social-cognitive neuroscience, the mental states of individuals become shared when they adapt to each other in the pursuit of a shared goal. We challenge this view by proposing an alternative approach to the cognitive foundations of social interactions. The central claim of this paper is that social cognition concerns the graded and dynamic process of alignment of individual minds, even in the absence of a shared goal. When individuals reciprocally exchange information about each other's minds processes of alignment unfold over time and across space, creating a social interaction. Not all cases of joint action involve such reciprocal exchange of information. To understand the nature of social interactions, then, we propose that attention should be focused on the manner in which people align words and thoughts, bodily postures and movements, in order to take one another into account and to make full use of socially relevant information.
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