Chapter 13: Social Cognition Flashcards
Autism
Book definition: “A neurological disorder characterized by deficits in social cognition and social communication often associated with an increase in repetitive behavior or obsessive interests. (p. 561)”
Default network
Book definition: “A network of brain areas that is active when a person is at wakeful rest and not engaged with the outside world. (p. 568)”
Empathic accuracy
Book definition: “The ability to accurately infer the thoughts, feelings, and/or emotional state of another person. (p. 573)”
Empathy
Book definition: “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”. (p. 576)”
False-belief task
Book definition: “A task that measures the ability to simultaneously represent the individual, and sometimes different, mental states of at least two people. (p. 582)”
Imitative behavior
Book definition: “The spontaneous and uncontrolled mimicking of another person’s behavior that is sometimes exhibited by patients with frontal lobe damage. (p. 589)”
Joint attention
Book definition: “The ability to monitor someone else’s attention by observing that person’s gaze or actions and directing one’s own attention similarly. (p. 585)”
Neuroeconomics
Book definition: “An emerging field of brain science that combines economics and cognitive neuroscience with the goal of understanding the neural mechanisms involved in decision making. (p. 596)”
Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)
Book definition: “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. (p. 593)”
Anatomically synonymous with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Damage to the orbitofrontal cortex can lead to several impairments related to social cognition – e.g. perseveration, the repetition of a particular response, such as a word or gesture, long after the stimulus which provoked it has ceased.
Reserval learning
Book definition: “An attempt to teach someone to respond in the opposite way in which they were previously taught. (p. 575)”
Self-reference effect
Book definition: “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. (p. 563)”
Simulation theory
Book definition: “A theoretical account of how we understand other people’s minds. From this perspective, we try to make inferences about other people’s minds by considering what we might do if we were in their situation. (p. 575)”
Social cognitive neuroscience
Book definition: “An emerging field of brain science that combines social-personality psychology and cognitive neuroscience with the goal of understanding the neural mechanisms involved in social interaction in humans. (p. 560)”
Theory of mind (ToM)
Book definition: “Also mentalizing. The ability to self-reflect and think about the mental states of others, which allows predictions of what others can understand, and how they will interact and behave in a given situation. This trait is considered unique to the human species. (p. 573)”
Theory theory (or mental state attribution system theory)
Book definition: “A scientific theory where one makes an assessment of other’s mental states based on their own theories of the outside world. (p. 575)”
