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Social Neuroscience: a complete summary of chapters 1-4
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This is a very extensive summary of the subject Social Neuroscience chapters 1-4.
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Chapter one: introduction to cognitive neuroscienceInteracting brains
- Within brains, different regions influence each other because of physical connections.
- Between brains (of different people), different regions may influence each other
because we can perceive, interpret and act on the social
behavior of others.
- Social neuroscience is concerned with those processes
(even if the norm is to study one brain at a time).
- In trusting relationships, activity associated with making a
decision (e.g. to give money) in one person’s brain may
predict activity in the reward centers of another person’s
brain (even before the money is received).
- Hyperscanning: is a technique that records two or more different brains
simultaneously (such as MRI scanners). This is a relatively rare methodology.
Mind and brain: An Empirical Example
- Wilder Penfield’s Direct electrical stimulation of the cortex.
- Produces ‘mental’ sensations of thinking, perceiving etc., rather than a sense of the
brain being stimulated.
- ‘A star came down and moved towards my nose’
- ‘Those fingers and my thumb gave a jump’
- ‘I heard the music again; it is like the radio’
- So if you stimulate your brain electrically you don’t feel like your brain is stimulated,
you just feel a thought or hear music.
- How does the brain do this?
Cognitive neuroscience approach
- Social neuroscience (Allport): an attempt to understand and explain, using the
methods and theories of neuroscience, how the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of
individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others.
- Cognitive neuroscience aims to provide a brain-based account of cognitive
processes (thinking, perceiving, remembering etc.).
- Made possible by technological advances in studying the brain that are safer and
less crude than, say, Penfield’s method.
Historical foundations
- Do mental experiences arise in the heart (e.g. Aristotle) or brain (e.g.
Plato)?
- Until the 18th century it was thought that mental experiences
originated from the liquids of the brain.
- Early anatomists believed that ventricles were important.
- The cortex was in that time often schematically drawn (top) or
misrepresented like intestines (bottom left).
- Gall en Spurzheim (1810) provide an accurate depiction
(bottom right).
1
, - How can a physical substance (brain/body) give rise to mental experiences?
(=mind-body problem)
- Dualism (Descartes): mind and body are separate substances.
- Dual-aspect theory: mind and body are two levels of explanation of the same
thing (e.g. like wave-particle duality).
- Reductionism: the mind is eventually explained solely in terms of
physical/biological theory.
- These issues are still relevant to modern cognitive neuroscience.
- In the early 19th century phrenology was the ‘scientific method’ to map out the
different functions of the brain.
- Different parts of the cortex serve different functions.
- Differences in personality traits manifest in differences in cortical size and
bumps on the skull.
- This was a method of crude division of psychological traits (e.g. ‘love of
animals’) and not grounded in science.
Functional Specialization without phrenology
- Although phrenology is discredited, the notion that different regions of the brain serve
different functions has stood the test of time.
- Modern cognitive neuroscience uses empirical methods to ascertain different
functions.
- It does not assume that each region has one function or each function has a
discrete location (unlike phrenology), but does assume some degree of
specialization of neurons in particular regions.
- Broca’s observations
- Patient with a left frontal lesion who could not speak (he
kept repeating the word ‘tan’) but had otherwise good
cognitive abilities.
- Broca concluded that there is a specialized language
faculty in the brain (Broca’s area).
- Wernicke’s observations
- Wernicke later observed a patient with poor speech
comprehension, but good production (Wernicke’s
aphasia).
- Suggests at least two language faculties in the brain (comprehension versus
production) that can be independently affected by brain damage.
- Note that the faculties were inferred from empirical observation (unlike
phrenological faculties).
- This inference can be made without necessarily knowing where in the brain
they are located.
- This approach later became known as cognitive neuropsychology.
The Computer Metaphor
- Much of twentieth century psychology was concerned with observations of behavior,
rather than observations of the brain during behavior.
- This led to models of cognition that don’t make direct
reference to the brain, e.g. the information-processing
models popular from the 1950s onward.
2
, - The models were inspired by thinking of the minds as a series of routines, like those
found in computers.
- Thinking of the mind as a computer need not entail a commitment to serial over
parallel processes in cognition
Cognitive Neuroscience
- 1970s → structural imaging methods (CT, MRI) enable precise images of the brain
(and brain lesions).
- 1980s → PET adapted to models of cognition developed by psychologists.
- 1985 → TMS is first used (a non-invasive, safer equivalent of Penfield’s earlier
studies).
- 1990 → level of oxygen in blood used as a measure of cognitive function (the
principle behind fMRI).
- 2000 → social neuroscience could be recognized as a relatively coherent entity with
a core set of research issues and methods and as reflected in prominent reviews of
the time.
- The number of publications incorporating the term ‘social’ and ‘neuroscience’
has increased dramatically since 2000, using the methods of cognitive
neuroscience to address questions traditionally posed by social psychology.
What is the ‘social brain’?
1. A modular view
a. One possibility is that there are particular neural substrates in the brain that
are involved in social cognition but not in other types of cognitive processing.
This relates to the notions of modularity and domain specificity.
i. Modularity: the notion that certain cognitive processes (or regions of
the brain) are restricted in the type of information they process and the
type of processing carried out.
1. Phrenology is an extreme form of a modularity view.
ii. Domain specificity: the idea that a cognitive process (or brain region)
is specialized for processing only one particular kind of information.
1. Often considered innate, universal (insofar as selected by
evolution) and localized.
2. E.g. modules for recognizing faces (but not other stimuli); for
detecting cheating (but not other types of reasoning).
b. Barrett and Satpute (2013) consider three broad ways in which the ‘social
brain’ may be implemented:
3
, i. There is a one-to-one association between brain structure and
function (strictly modular). Consisting of brain regions that are
specialized for processing particular kinds of social information (e.g.
person perception) and non-social information (e.g. cognitive control).
ii. The network consists of specialized units that interact (network of
modules). Each region in the network has a high degree of
specialization (e.g. specific to social information).
iii. The network consists of interactions between non-specialized units.
Neither brain regions nor individual brain networks are functionally
specialized or segregated into social and non-social functions
(non-modular).
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