What does social cognitive neuroscience study? - Chapter 13

What are the anatomical substrates of social cognition?

Regions of the PFC are a primary focus in this chapter. The PFC is the anterior aspect of the frontal lobe and evolution's latest addition to the brain. The lateral aspect of the PFC is divided into the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC). The medial regions that we are concerned with are the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). 

What is the link between social interactions and development?

The PFC, necessary for cognitive control, impulse control, and decision making continues to develop throughout childhood and adolescence. This period of maturation is accompanies by parallel developmental changes in social behavior, such as an increase in peer-peer interactions that are characterized by an abundance of social play behavior. The PFC also continues to develop during adolescence. Social isolation and a lack of social play, for instance during your childhood and adolescence, can have a negative impact on the neuronal development of areas that support social behavior, resulting in social behavioral deficits that last into adulthood. Also, having a lot of social stress during your childhood affects the neuronal development of the brain, and social stress in adults has a great impact on the neural degeneration. 

What are social behavioral deficits in acquired and neurodevelopmental disorders?

Social behavioral deficits can be the result of both acquired lesions to the frontal cortex and neurodevelopmental disorders that affect the frontal cortex. Changes in social functioning are common in patients with acquired lesions to their orbitofrontal cortex, which include trauma, stroke or surgery, and neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson's or dementia. People with orbitofrontal damage may also demonstrate cognitive control deficits that affect social behavior, but they may also lack insight into these changes and their inappropriate social conduct. 

Several neurodevelopmental disorders are associated with deficits in social behavior, including antisocial personality disorder, schizophrenia, and autism spectrum disorder. Both schizophrenia and ASD are heterogenous disorders with varying symptoms, including deficits in social perception, in social knowledge and in the theory of mind. These impairments cause difficulties in interpreting the speech and action of others in order to understand their intentions, knowledge and beliefs. 

What holds Socrates's imperative: Know Thyself?

We develop our self-knowlegde through self-perception processes designed to gather information about the self. The big question in social cognitive neuroscience center on which neural and psychological mechanisms support the processing of information about the self and about other people whether these mechanisms are the same or different, how the brain differentiates between the self and other, and how social contexts affect these processes. 

According to the Levels-of-processing model of memory, affects the depth of processing profoundly on the storage of information. People remember significantly more information when they process it in relation to themselves. The enhanced memory for information processed in relation to the self is known as the self-reference effect. The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) was differentially activated when you hear words about your self compared to other words. In addition to having a uniquely strong memory for traits that we judge in relation to ourselves, we have a unique way of deciding whether a trait is self-descriptive. 

When we are at rest, cognitively speaking, our brains continue to engage but revert to a number of psychological processes that describe a default mode of brain function. Researchers named the brain regions that support these processes the default network. The default network consists of the MPFC, precunues, posterior cingulate cortex, retrosplenial cortex, TPJ, medial temporal lobe and inferior parietal lobule. The researchers hypothesized that the higher metabolic rate in the MPFC reflects self-referential processing, such as thinking about what might be getting ready to do or evaluating our current condition. Thus, the default network is there to ensure that we always have some idea of what is going on around us. This is called the sentinel hypothesis. The default network is most active when tasks direct our attention away from external stimuli and we are inwardly focused, engaged in self-reflective thought and judgment assessments that depend on social and emotional content. It is connected to the medial temporal lobe memory system, which explains why we often consider the past in these ramblings. 

Even though we have the richest possible set of data against which to judge ourselves, this process is often inaccurate. A wide range of behavioral studies have shown that people often have unrealistically positive self-perceptions. Studies suggest that the most ventral portion of the anterior cingulate cortex is responsible for focusing attention on positive information about the self. 

All the information you know about the world is received through sense organs mounted on a moving target - your body. Most of us take for granted the feeling of body ownership, complete with all its parts, and the feeling of spatial unity between the 'self' and the body - referred to as embodiment. The TPJ, temporoparietal junction, is involved in self processing and integrating multisensory body-related information, which plays a key role in the feeling of embodiment. 

How can you understand the mental states of others?

When engaging in complex social interaction, it is critical for us to understand the mental states of others and to accurately anticipate their behavior. These cognitive skills are necessary for the cooperation involved with creating complex technologies, cultural institutions, and systems of symbols. Empathic accuracy refers to a perceiver's ability to correctly infer a target person's thoughts and feelings. To infer the thoughts of others, the perceiver must translate what is observable into an inference about what is unobservable - their psychological state. The mental state attribution theory or theory theory proposes that we acquire a commonsense 'folk psychology' and use it, somewhat like a scientific theory, to infer the thoughts of others. 

Also an alternative theory was suggested, the simulation theory, which has since morphed into experience sharing theory. This proposes that we do not need to have an elaborate theory about the mind of others in order to infer their thoughts or predict their actions. We simply observe someone else's behavior, simulate it, and use our own mental state produced by that simulation to predict the mental state of the other. 

The ability to impute mental states to oneself and to other people is known as the theory of mind (ToM). From the get-go an infant prefers to look at a human face rather than at other objects, and when she does see a face the infant has a social interaction through imitative behavior. This innate ability to automatically imitate others is the foundation, that leads to our theory of mind. For several years the Sally-Ann false belief task was the essential test in determining the presence or absence of theory of mind. 

What are the neural correlates of experience sharing theory/simulation theory?

The simulation theory suggests that some aspects of inferring the thoughts of others are based on our ability to mimic their actions, such as facial expressions and eye gaze. Many researchers invoke mirror neurons - which activate both while one is observing another's action and when one is performing it oneself - as the neural basis of shared representation. 

Empathy is our capacity to understand and respond to the unique affective experiences of another person, and it empitomizes the strong relation between self-perception and the perception of others. The perception-action model of empathy assumes that during perception of another's emotional state of mind, the same affective state is activated in the observer, triggering somatic and autonomic responses, thus, by experiencing it, the observer understands it. 

What are the neural correlates of the mental state attribution theory/theory theory?

Researchers find it difficult to design tasks that can identify which brain regions are involves when someone is inferring unobservable mental states from observable cues. Regions that are commonly engaged in a variety of tasks while participants are making inferences about the thoughts and beliefs of others include the medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction, superior temporal sulcus and the temporal poles.

The medial prefrontal cortex is involved in the perception of others when we use ourselves to understand others, or when we represent information about the other person in a manner that is as complex as the way we store information about ourselves. 

The right temporoparietal junction is important for reasoning about other people's mental states. Humans are also the only primates that follow eye gaze direction rather than the direction of the head of people. Processing that occurs in the superior temporal sulcus is important for inferring mental states from the eye gaze we follow. 

What is the link between autism spectrum disorder and the how you see the mental states of others?

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) refers to a group of neurodevelopmental disorders that include autism, Asperger's syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder, and pervasive developmental disorders not otherwise specified. The study of ASD provides a fascinating window into the important roles of both mental state attribution abilities and imitation abilities in navigating our social worlds. 

Changes in the white matter connectivity patterns have been observed in 6-month-old babies and adults with ASD. Some researchers point out that these changes in connectivity patterns are at the root of the behavioral changes associated with ASD. When you look at the theory of mind by people with ASD, it is shown that the theory-of-mind-skills of patients with ASD are not developed properly, that is why social interaction is one of the more symptoms associated with ASD. 

Also, multiple brain systems appear to function differently in autistic individuals. One deficit, observed in the mirror neuron network, results in a failure of linking motor acts into action chains that allow motor intentions to be understood. 

What is social knowledge?

Current models of the role that the orbitofrontal cortex plays in humans, in social decision making, propose that this region helps individuals to identify which social rules are appropriate for a given situation so that they may flexibly change their behavior. Damage to the ventromedial frontal lobe disrupts the ability to learn from negative feedback but not from positive feedback.