Chapter 13: Social cognition Flashcards
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
A group of neurodevelopmental disorders that include autism, Asperger’s syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder, and pervasive developmental disorders not otherwise specified.
These disorders are characterized by deficits in social cognition and social communication often associated with an increase in repetitive behavior or obsessive interests.
Autoscopic phenomenon (AP)
A visual body illusion that affects the entire body. Out-of-body experiences, autoscopic hallucinations, and heautoscopy are three types of APs.
Default network
A network of brain areas that is active when a person is at wakeful rest and not engaged with the outside world.
Embodiment
The feeling of spatial unity between the “self” and the body.
Empathic accuracy
The ability to accurately infer the thoughts, feelings, and/or emotional state of another person.
Empathy
The ability to experience and understand what others feel while still knowing the difference between oneself and others. Empathy is often described as the ability to “put oneself in another person’s shoes.”
Experience sharing theory
Originally called the simulation theory. A theory proposing 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.
False-belief task
A task that measures the ability to attribute false believes to others.
Imitative behavior
The spontaneous and uncontrolled mimicking of another person’s behavior that is sometimes exhibited by patients with frontal lobe damage.
Joint attention
The ability to monitor someone else’s attention by observing that person’s gaze or actions and directing one’s own attention similarity.
Mental state attribution theory
Originally called theory theory. A theory proposing that we acquire a commonsense “folk psychology” and use it, somewhat like a scientific theory, to infer the thoughts of others (“mind-read”).
Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)
Also called the ventromedial zone. A region of the frontal lobe, located above the orbits of the eyes, that is implicated in a range of functions, including perceptual processes associated with olfaction and taste, as well as those associated with monitoring whether one’s behavior is appropriate.
Prefrontal cortex (PFC)
A region of cortex that takes part in the higher aspects of motor control and planning and execution of behavior, perhaps especially tasks that require the integration of information over time and thus mandate the involvement of working memory mechanisms.
The prefrontal cortex has three or more main areas that are commonly referred to in descriptions of the gross anatomy of the frontal lobe: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate and medial frontal regions, and the orbitofrontal cortex.
Reversal learning
An attempt to teach someone to respond in the opposite way from what they were previously taught.
Self-reference effect
An effect rooted in the theoretical perspective that the recall of information is related to how deeply the information was initially processed.
Specifically, the self-reference effect is the superior memory for information that is encoded in relation to oneself.
