Summary Social Neuroscience – YouTube videos + book (= blue text)
Chapter 1 – Introduction to social neuroscience
Interacting brains
- Within brains, different regions influence each other because of physical connections
- Neurons are connected with each other (next to each other, communicate by synapses
+ from a distance)
- Through structural properties of our brain
- Between brains (of different people), different regions may influence each other because we
can perceive, interpret and act on the social behaviour of others
- Activity in regions of one person’s brain can reliably elicit activity in other regions of
another person’s brain during this social interaction
- Social neuroscience is concerned with those processes (even if the norm is to study one
brain at a time!)
- In a trusting relationship, 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, but anticipating the reward)
- The other person’s brain ‘lights up’ their reward pathways
- One region to my brain can interact with one region to your brain
- To do with you being able to interpret what the meaning of my face is
- Hyperscanning = the simultaneous recording from two or more different brains (e.g. using
fMRI or EEG)
- Neural activity in different regions not only within the same brain (due to physical
connections) but also across brains (due to mutual understanding)
- Interactions between different individuals can be characterized by the same principle: a kind
of ‘mega-brain’ in which different regions in different brains can have mutual influence over
each other
Social neuroscience: a definition
= An attempt to understand and explain, using the methods and theories of neuroscience,
how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of individuals are influenced by the actual,
imagined or implied presence of others
- Social interactions can be thinking about others intentions
- Facebook is social interaction (human at the other end), Google isn’t
History of social neuroscience
- Uses the methods of cognitive neuroscience to address questions traditionally posed by
social psychology
- Term used less commonly now = ‘social cognitive neuroscience’
- Since 2000, before that it wasn’t called that/not the same label
- Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as thinking, perceiving,
speaking, acting and planning
- Tends to dissect these processes into different sub-mechanisms and explain complex
behaviour in terms of their interaction
- Important role to play in social neuroscience
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, - Because it aims to decompose complex social behaviours into simpler
mechanisms (operating in individuals minds) that are amenable (= vatbaar) for
exploration using neuroscientific methodologies
Social neuroscience links together all these disciplines
- Linking cognitive and social psychology & linking ‘mind’ (psychology) with brain
(biology, neuroscience)
- Face perception came from 1980’s, faces weren’t seen as social objects
- Faces as a type of visual object rather than treating faces as cues of social
interactions
- Future of social neuroscience lies both in terms of real-world applications (ecological
validity) and also in terms of an additional level of sophistication afforded by computational
approaches to brain networks
- Ecological validity = an approach or measure that is meaningful outside of the
laboratory context
What is the ‘social brain’?
1. A modular view
- 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
- Define cognition into different kind of processes
- Particular kind of information
- Specialised routines that perform very specific functions on a limited set of inputs (latter
termed ‘domain specificity’)
- Some processes that process only one kind of information
- There are particular neural subtrates in the brain that are involved in social cognition
but not in other types of cognitive processing
- Domain specificity = the idea that a cognitive process (or brain region) is specialized
for processing only one particular kind of information
- The module processed only one kind of input (e.g. only faces, only emotions)
- Often considered innate, universal (insofar as selected by evolution) and localized
- Innate: been shaped by evolution
- Need to be acculturated, for example children speaking
- E.g. modules for recognizing faces (but not other stimuli); for detecting cheating (but not
other types of reasoning)
2. A non-specialized view
- Polar opposite from modular view
- Social cognition linked to general cognitive capacities (e.g. general intelligence, language)
- We have learned to be very intelligent, in social- and non-social domain
- Social and non-social cognition evolve hand-in-hand; although one may tend to drive the
other
- But crucially they did not necessarily lead to highly specialized routines in the brain
for dealing with social problems
- Bigger brains leads to changes in both social and non-social intelligence
- We develop bigger brains to outwit each other
- Nothing to do with being social
- Pressure to outwit peers may lead to increased intelligence in non-social domain
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,3. Social information is different
- Hybrid positions
- Mitchell (2009)
- Some regions of the brain (e.g. medial prefrontal cortex: evolved in understanding
each other’s personality traits) activated (in fMRI) by a wide range of social tasks
- Such as evaluating attitudes, interpreting other’s behaviour and emotional
experience
- More specialized for social information
- Social information is more fuzzy/less stable
- But claims it is not a highly specialized ‘module’ social psychology is a ‘natural
kind’
- Semi modular view
- May depend on nature of social information (more fuzzy less stable, less definite)
- Rather than because it is social per se
4. Special kinds of neural mechanism
… that are especially suited to social processes
- Mirror systems may serve this function
- Mirror systems: not very social
- If the monkey reaches for food, the neuron might fire
- Animal does something when somebody else does something
- Not clear whether it helps you understand another person
- Neurons that respond to both self-behaviour and other-behaviour (e.g. during
intentional actions)
- Enables a correspondence between self and other
- May be comparable systems for emotion and sensation (e.g. pain) as well as action
- Neurons respond to having pain compared to whether you see somebody else
have pain
- Not tightly localized to one region and not strictly modular
- Especially suited for social processes?
- They arise primarily out of associative learning between action and
perception in both social and non-social context such as observing one’s own
actions
5. A mixed model
- Some parts of the social brain might be modular, module-like, non-modular depending on
the specific function
- Maybe reasoning is general intelligence, but apply reasoning to what you think about
me in the same way as a test for general intelligence
- Not one or the other
- This a recurring theme in social neuroscience: what is the nature of the underlying
mechanisms that support social behaviour?
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, The ‘best’ level of explanation?
- General healthy scepticism that in order to understand social processes, we need to
understand social behaviour by studying interaction of individuals, groups and between
groups and not within an individual and their brains
- Neuroscience: interested in things from chemicals up to neural circuits
- Social psychology: interested in individual and group interactions
Trivial way to connect: all your brain is doing is storing social knowledge
- Doesn’t change anything
- To understand a social phenomenon such as prejudice (= vooroordeel), we need to
understand the social, economic, and historical context
- NOT understand the underlying circuitry in the brain
- Cannot understand it by looking at the brain
- But white person responds differently to different races of people
- History of slavery, why one group takes advantage of another group
- Social neuroscience doesn’t necessarily argue against these factors it is not reductionist
- Reductionism implies that one type of explanation will become replaced with
another, more basic, type of explanation over time
Language of social psychology (attitudes, relationships, conformity) will be
replaced by the concepts of neuroscience (oxytocin, plasticity, medial
prefrontal cortex)
- It attempts to link together different levels of explanation. It can ask questions like:
- Is there something about the structure/function of the brain that makes prejudice
likely (or inevitable) given a particular socio-economic context?
- Stereotyping, society feeds on it?
- What kind of brain-based mechanism do people use to avoid prejudice and how
could this knowledge inform social policy?
Linking levels of explanation
- White person will activate their amygdala when they see a black face, but not when they see
a white face
- Brain-based fear reaction
- Reverse inference is one approach, due to heavy reliance of functional imaging
= An attempt to infer (= afleiden) the nature of cognitive processes from neuroscience
(notable neuroimaging) data
Activity within the amygdala may be taken to imply the involvement of
fear-related (or more broadly emotion-related) mechanism in studies of race
processing
- “If the amygdala is activated then someone is frightened”
- We can get information about the brain, how do we interpret it?
- What baggage do you bring to it? How important is the amygdala to you?
- From patterns of brain activity we attempt to infer the nature of the underlying cognitive
mechanisms, e.g. amygdala activation used to infer that the mechanism is ‘emotional’; lateral
prefrontal cortex activation used to infer that the process requires ‘control’, etc.
- Although legitimate, there is an obvious danger in this approach as the inference depends on
the validity of the current (but fluctuating) state of knowledge
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