Week 12: Social cognition Flashcards
What is social cognitive neuroscience?
Understanding how brain function supports the cognitive processes underlying social behaviour
(using neuroscience to explain social behaviour)
What part of the brain did phineas gage have severe damage to? and what did he expereince?
The orbitofrontal cortex
Major personality changes
Early procedures for schizophrenic patients with the orbitofrontal cortex?
Walter Freeman put an icepick into the orbitofrontal cortex and moved it around in order to destroy cells here
For schizophrenic patients, it calmed them down however, they were not themselves anymore
What is self-referential processing?
Thinking about anything that is in relation to yourself
What is mindblindness?
The inability to properly represent the mental states of others
Can’t understand how someone else is feeling
What does Autism include?
- Mindblindness
- Qualitative impairment in social interaction
- Repetitive patterns of behaviour and interests
- Symptoms must be present in the early developmental period
There are also neurophysiological measurements (eye movements, and neural activity). But haven’t made much progress here.
Why are eyes considered to be the window into the mind?
get information re: someone else’s mental states
E.g. We know if someone is looking at something they are paying attention to it
What have eye tracing studies found regarding where we look in social interactions
In a normal population, we typically look at the eyes of people to get information (65% looking at eyes) can make inferences about internal mental state
Autistic patients don’t. They typically look at the mouth (may be an abnormal development of theory of mind - can’t figure out how they can use the eyes to make inferences)
Brain activation in schizophrenia?
PET tracer studies with passive tasks - have found that activity in the prefrontal cortex is different in schizophrenic patients.
Schizophrenic patients are showing hypo-metabolism (less metabolism = less activation)
In normal subjects, we have a lot of activity in the regions involved in the brain areas relating to self-referential processing (PFC) but we don’t see these levels in schizophrenic patients
What have activation studies in depressed patients found?
More activity here! unlike schizophrenia
- depressed patients are thinking more about themselves more than normal population
- indicates that if you spend too much time thinking about yourself it can be problematic
What is the self reference effect?
Have enhanced memory for information processed in relation to the self
What have brain activation studies found in relation to the self reference effect?
Medial prefrontal cortex activity is associated with self-referential processing when compared to processing words in relation to others (no difference between words in relation to others and word print)
When asked to do nothing, what do we think about?
We actually think about ourselves in some way or another - this is our default network
What is the sentinel hypothesis of the default network?
Default network is there to ensure we always have some idea of what is going on around us - protect from predators etc
When is our default network more activated?
When we are inwardly focussed and there is a lack of attention on external stimuli
What about when you are judging yourself?
When rating traits relating to yourself on a likert scale:
- When rate highly and think it is relevant to you: there is an increase in anterior cingulate cortex depending on whether its +/- we tend to overestimate ourselves on positive traits (deactivation for negative - maybe don’t apply it to ourselves as strongly)
- when rate trait as having nothing to do with you, doesn’t matter if trait is +/-
Conversational studies including orbitofrontal damage patients?
- Had a conversation
- Rated themselves
- Rewatched the conversation and re-rated
- Controls rate themselves higher after they see the video
- Those with damage rate themselves lower (they get embarrassed and recognise mistakes they didn’t in the moment)
What is the theory of mind?
the ability to infer the mental state of other people
gaze, facial expressions etc used to make infereces
What is empathy?
our capacity to understand and respond to unique experiences of another person
What is empathic accuracy?
A perceivers accuracy in inferring a target person’s thoughts and feelings
Can babies process information about faces?
Babies are quick to process information about faces and use the same neural structures for this as adults BUT it takes much longer before they start incorporating contextual information and start understanding what others are thinking (metaphors, irony, jokes)
What is the Sally-Anne false belief task?
Sally places her marble in the basket - and then exits
Anne transfers Sally’s marble to a drawer
Sally reenters
Where does she look for the marble?
(Being able to take on someone else’s point of view)
The adult equivalent of the Sally-Anne experiment results?
Watch movies that start with someone placing a ball on a table in front of an opaque screen and then it rolls behind- 4 conditions (ball moves or not, the interviewer sees this or not)
- participants reaction time is still influenced by the interviewer
What is the simulation theory of inferring other peoples thoughts?
- When observing another persons behaviour, we imagine it unconsciously through mirror neurons
- Then have a physiological response that we feel and interpret to understand how that person is feeling
