Does Social
Neuroscience
Contribute to
social cognition?
9.00 Robin Dunbar
9.50 Cecilia Heyes
11.00 Ian Apperly
11.50 Claus Lamm
13.40 Karin Roelofs
14.50 Debate
: Evolution and the social brain
: Mirror Neurons: From Origins to Function
: Controlled and automatic mindreading in children and adults
: Empathy, Prosocial and Moral Behavior
: Neuroendocrine mechanisms of social behavior
Does Social
Neuroscience
Contribute to
social cognition?
Debate with all speakers
Discussant: Klaus Fiedler
Moderator: Frank Van Overwalle
• Social neuroscience integrates ideas from multiple
research areas in psychology and neuroscience to address
questions about social processes in the mind and brain
• New descipline since around 2005
Goal of Social neuroscience
• ESAN: European Social Affective Neuroscience (2008)
• SANS: Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (2008)
• S4SN: Society for Social Neuroscience (2010)
Dedicated societies
Dedicated journals
Social Brain Mapping
• Where are high-level social psychological processes located in the
brain?
• By scanning participants’ brains, we study the neural basis of …
• romantic love while viewing pictures of significant others > strangers (Aron et
al., 2005).
• self while judging whether trait adjectives describe the self > another person
(Kelley et al., 2002; Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005).
• social information processing while judging animate > inanimate objects
(Mitchell, Heatherton, & Macrae, 2002).
• Question: do we identify the critical processes and brain areas?
Approaches
(Amodio, Social Cognition, 2010)
Social Brain Mapping
Mirror / Mentalizing Networks specialized for social processing
Approaches
Social Brain Mapping
• Since processing in the brain creates / requires memory traces, it is
legitimate to ask where high-level psychological processes are located
(eliminating subsidiary processes)
• Motivation:
Social Brain Hypothesis
• Dedicated methods:
• fMRI Adaptation
• fMRI Pattern analysis
Approaches
Social Brain Mapping
However, the brain is an economic device, using very similar areas for
social and non-social processing, showing some overlap of…
• ToM -and- attention reorientation in TPJ
• High abstract thinking on people -and- objects in mPFC
Approaches
Social Hypothesis Testing
• The use of new methods for assessing psychological
variables instead of RT or cognitive load manipulations
• ERP: event-related potentials
• fMRI: functional magnetic resonance imaging & related
methods
Approaches
(Amodio, Social Cognition, 2010)
Social Hypothesis Testing
• A single core trait inference system: implicit/spontaneous activations
when reading behaviors are extended under explicit/intentional
instructions to infer a trait from behaviors
Approaches
Social Hypothesis Testing
• The application of methods from behavioral research is often limited:
• RT (because presentation takes longer)
• Cognitive load (because secondary task activates other areas of
no interest)
• Interactions (do not show summation of waves in ERPs)
Approaches
1.
What are the major contributions (success stories) of social
neuroscience to the understanding of social behavior?
• What have we discovered anew?
• What have neuroimaging methods contributed over and above behavioral
methods such as RT?
2.
3.
What are the major disappointments of social neuroscience (and is
it possible to do something about it)?
Future: What are threats and critical issues / questions
Questions for debate
In a first round,
• each of the speakers addresses one or more of these three
questions in a short contribution (maximum 3-5 minutes)
• the discussant focuses on what he considers the most critical
points in social neuroscience. He also addresses some of the
points raised in the first round (maximum 10 minutes)
In a second round,
• all speakers may interact and respond to the discussant’s critique,
and he may respond as well (later or interactively)
• the public may joint in at this point as well.
The debate