lecture 10 - the social brain Flashcards
human _______ may be rooted in our evolutionary history
hypersociality
are there brain mechanisms that make us social
what are the 3 solutions
yes,
1)there are specialised brain regions for processing social information
2) blurring the distinction between self and other
3)
dunbar et al 2007
-measured different primate brain sizes against their group size
-he found a correlation between neocortex ration(brain size) of primates (eg like monkey and apes) and their mean group size
temporal cortex and faces - an aquiring mechanism ? social mechanism?
-proposed that there’s something there to allow us to socially recall who the person is
-not an evolutionary given mechanism for face perception, but a mechanism for acquiring face perception
is there a specific period we need to learn faces in order to do this the rest of our lives ?
-seems to be a sensitive period we need to learn them
-if people don’t learn faces at a specific time they wont develop this and be able to recognise them
experiments where children are shown faces and face like configurations (top heavy etc)
results
-children prefer faces or what roughly look like faces
-even if features are mixed up, children will prefer the one closest to a face
blurring the distinctions between self and others
-sometimes called shared representations
-we process things that happen to other people the same way we would process it happening to ourselves
seeing people or primates smiling has what response in us?
-makes us smile, we respond emotionally to these things ,
shared representation for self and other
mimicking
yawning
people unconsciously and non strategically mimic the postures of the person they interreact with
-seeing someone else yawn makes you yawn
subtle behaviours that indicate shared representation
People automatically synchronize swinging of hand-held pendulums (Richardson et al., 2005;Schmidt & O’Brien, 1997).
Synchronize postural sway (Shockley, Santana, & Fowler, 2003)
The motion of rocking chairs(Goodman, Icenhower , Marsh, Schmidt, & Richardson, 2005)
imitation and mimicry
-study shows babies and bay primates imitate and mimic behaviours
-not sure how accurate this is , as babies have poor vision
experience of another person…..
experience of another person-
-map this onto our own experiences
-derive associated mental states
mirror neurons
fire both when the monkey performs a specific action and when he sees the same action being performed by someone else.