by Albert Major

Social approach to Cognitive Science

• Social cognition is how people make sense of other people and themselves
• It studies both how we perceive others and how we understand ourselves
• The field has four core assumptions:
  • People use mental representations
  • These representations can change over time
  • It's highly interdisciplinary (combines psychology, neuroscience, etc.)
  • Aims to apply findings to improve the real world (e.g. make the world a better place)

Evolutionary Perspective:

• Two competing theories:
  1. Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis:
     • Places social interactions at the center of human intelligence
     • Suggests our intelligence developed primarily through social interactions
  2. General Intelligence Hypothesis:
     • Suggests intelligence developed to solve all types of problems
     • Social intelligence is just one aspect of general intelligence
• Research supports Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis:
  • Human children outperform primates on social problems
  • Larger neocortex size correlates with larger social group sizes

Joint Attention:

Joint attention is the ability to focus attention where somebody else is focusing

• Two types:
  1. Responding to Joint Attention (RJA):
     • Following others' gestures and gaze directions
     • More passive form of social interaction
  2. Initiating Joint Attention (IJA):
     • Actively directing others' attention through gestures or eye movements
     • More sophisticated form of social interaction
  • Autistic children and chimpanzees have RJA but not IJA
• Neural systems involved:

  • Posterior attention system: handles automatic responses — it directs our gaze to biologically meaningful stimuli

  • Anterior attention system: handles voluntary attention direction — mediates goal-directed attention

    

Social Cognitive Neuroscience:

• Specific brain regions involved in social tasks:
  • Medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC): activates specifically for social tasks
  • Right temporal parietal junction: activates for both social and non-social tasks
• Mitchell (2008) found social brain areas have a high metabolic rate (activity) even during rest
  • Suggests we naturally default to social reasoning

Mirror Neurons:

• Specific brain cells that fire both when:
  • An animal performs an action
  • The animal watches another perform the same action
• Found definitively in monkeys, debated in humans
• May help with:
  • Observational learning
  • Behavioural intent (Understanding others' intentions)
  • Experiencing empathy