Social cognition Flashcards
Vad är grunderna till social cognition?
Hjärnan använder olika nätverk i sociala sammanhang som utanför. Olika komponenter och nätverk är mer synliga än andra i sociala sammanhang.
Det är dock komplext att undersöka hur det påverkar den sociala miljön på grund av att vi måste behålla god ekologisk validitet men samtidigt ha kontrollerade miljöer.
På så sätt måste vi tillförskriva ett socialt värde av uppgifter.
Vet att i princip hela hjärnan aktiveras i sociala situationer.
Är vi speciellt programmerade för sociala kontext?
Det finns mycket bevis för att vi bearbetar social information annorlunda från andra djur. Vi tar ut info från lätta saker.
- Heider & Simmel bildade en paradigm om social kognition.
Om att vi gör sociala situationer även om människor inte är involverade. Cirklar som rör sig är socialt. För att vi så starkt är byggda runt sociala kopplingar.
- Dock på en individuell nivå hur mycket vi överför mänskliga kopplingar till djur eller objekt.
- Ensamma människor överför mer än sociala människor.
- Det kräver ansträngning och motivation för att tänka på andras perspektiv. Mycket kognitiv kontroll.
När vi tittar på former aktiverar vi sociala regioner - som FFA.
Också aktivering i superior temporal sulcus som är viktig för biologisk rörelse.
Att resonera om social information verkar också lättare än icke-social information som syns genom Wason selection task.
Fyra kort som följer en regel. Lättare om vi sätter det i ett socialt kontext.
One can only drink alcohol if one is older then 20. At a bar,
everyone is holding a card one a drink they wish in one side
and their age on the other side.
* Which two cards to you need to turn over to confirm the rule?
Easier if we can apply a social situation.
In this context the task is easier.
Make less mistakes in social tasks than abstract tasks.
Horner and Whiten (2005)
Chimpanzees and 3- to 4-year-old children observed a human
demonstrator use a tool to retrieve a reward from a puzzle-box.
The demonstration involved both relevant and irrelevant actions,
and the box was presented in two conditions: opaque and clear.
When chimpanzees were presented with the opaque box, they
imitated both relevant and irrelevant actions. However, when the
box was presented in the clear condition, they ignored the
irrelevant actions in favour of a more efficient, emulative
technique.
Children employed imitation to solve the task in both conditions,
at the expense of efficiency.
This difference may be due to a greater susceptibility of children
to cultural conventions, perhaps combined with a differential
focus on the results, actions and goals of the demonstrator.
We empathize more with others - at cost of not solving problems as efficiently.
Children copy acts even if they moght be unnnecessary - following teachers, building a connection that goes beyond taking the piece of candy.
The kids have a special things fro imitating what they are looking at
Vilka processer är aktiva i social kognition.
Perception of social relevant cues (e.g.,
face, biological movement, voice)
- Interpretation and judgement
- Perceive goal-directed behavior
- Understanding your own reaction and
others’ reactions and motives (ToM)
- Motivate to act
- Coordinate actions with others
How do I engage with someone
what are the process mental before interactions
Perception of faces, values, effective reasoning, emotional info, empath, motivation to interact.
Affective Processes:
related to emotion,
motivation and
empathic simulation
Cognitive Processes:
related to perception
of faces, biological
movement and theory
of mind.
In all these. stages; different process
EMotional and cognitive sides.
Hur uppfattar vi andra
Face perception
Invariant/static aspects of faces underlies
the recognition of individuals, whereas the
representation of changeable/dynamic
aspects of faces, such as eye gaze,
expression, and lip movement, underlies the
perception of information that facilitates
social communication and interaction.
Static aspects of faces activate the lateral
fusiform gyrus, whereas changeable aspects
activate the superior temporal sulcus.
Lateral/Fusiform FA
This is important to recognize aspects of a face that is not changeable, identiy.
changeable aspects; superior. temporal sulcus. Important for processing biological movement and changeable aspects; emotions in a given situation.
Expressions, movements that a person is doing
Visual: occipital, FFA, Superior temporal sulcus.
A model for face perception
The core face system (composed by the inferior
occipital gyri, the fusiform gyrus and the
superior temporal sulcus) interacts with brain
regions, forming the extended system, from
other systems that can be recruited to act in
concert with the regions in the core system to
extract meaning from faces.
LFG - identity
Superior: empotion, movement of eyes. Face in a context.
This system will activate other extended systems for recognizing faces.
Emotion, voice, associations,
We do this very fast.
The timing of face processing
In this MEG study the authors identifying two
stages of face processing:
1) Coarse face categorization (such as gender
and emotion) seems to occur as early as 100
ms after stimulus onset (see the ‘M100’ effect
in the picture).
2) Face identity follows thereafter, and it seems
to occur 170 ms after stimulus onset (see the
‘M170’ response in the picture).
N170 important to recognize identity, who is this person.
Takes as little as 170 ms to recognize who the person is, but other things like gender; even around 100 ms, emotion as well
Very tuned for face recognition.
Recognizing who is inf ront of us
After recognizing face, judgement and evalutation.
Vad är processen av perception till utredning och bedömning?
These brain regions are involved with having the first emotional judgement
Amygdala, Ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Amygdala; different levels of the processing. Police, vigilance. Relevant for face recognition because its related with emotion
Striatum: reward pathway of the brain: Dopamine. Sense of feeling motivated to act
These reegions. when perceiving we need these for judgeent of emotional value for a given situation. Do I care about this or do I not care?
Amygdala is very important for face recognition.
The neural system that links sensory representations of stimuli with the
social judgements:
* The amygdala
* The ventral striatum (involved in reward and reinforcement learning)
* The orbitofrontal cortex/ventromedial prefrontal cortex
Amygdala is involved in trustworthy judgments
Amygdala activation levels for faces that received the lowest (Low), medium (Med) or highest (High)
ratings of trustworthiness. These activations were measured under two task conditions: an implicit task
in which viewers were asked to judge the gender of the face, and an explicit task in which viewers were
asked to judge the trustworthiness of the face.
SM had trouble with processing certain emotional aspects of a face.
Patients without amygdala judge people as being more trustworthy compared to people with healthy brains.
Had no street smarts.
A bunch of faces. People are asked to do either implicit tasks for categorizing gender. Or explicit; is this a stressed face or not.
Even if task is implicit. Require more amygdala activation.
Looking at a face we don’t trust; more amygdala activation. If no amygdala, more trust, cannot make the judgement.
Rate faces more trustworthy in comparison to people with other damages in brain or healthy brains.
Signal in amygdala.
These patients: eye movement patterns are not the same as healhty brains.
We look at eyes, nose, mouth. The triangle shape. People with amygdala damage; donät have attention, guided emotion, to eyes. When she is asked to look, their activation is similar to those of healthy brains. But they do not do it themselves.
One needs an amygdala to makes these judgements.
Patients with bilateral amygdala damage are impaired in judging how much they
trust others from viewing their face.
Control patients are
patients with damaged to
other brain regions, but the
amygdala is preserved.
Ventromedial
prefrontal cortex
* Patients with VMPC
damage have deficits in
interpreting nonverbal
social information such as
facial expression,
gestures, or body
posture, even though
they typically have
preserved declarative
knowledge of basic social
and moral norms.
Helps us to make decisions. Seent hat these patients have difficulty in nonverbal social communication, postures, gestures, facial expressions.
Striatum: Reward pathway: release of dopamin in prefrontal
Vad är steget efter bedömning?
We’ve perceived, made a judgement. Next stage: empathy super important.
If we don’t empathize, there is no motivation to act.
The insula
* Interoceptive information about the
body state.
* Allows for the construction of
representations of how we feel in a
given context.
Dependent on the insula. Info about our state of our body , body parts in their envionrment..
We use same insula to evaluate our own body, but also other people’s bodies.
Feel what other people are feeling.
Construction, representation of how are bodies are doing in contexts.
Insula damage: difficulties in evaluating state of bodies. Maybe cannot move half of body, but can not recognize it. Cannot represent their own body or recognizing body parts.
“What is this leg doing here with me. This leg isn’t mine. Why am I in a hospital bed?”
The insula is also involved in the empathic feeling of others’ emotions.
* Empathy: sensitivity to what and how other people are thinking and feeling.
* Feeling component: feeling what other people are feeling.
* Cognitive component: knowing or imagining what other people are feeling.
* Brain regions associated with representation of own and others feelings
include the insula and also the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC is may
be involved in behavioral regulation and motivation to act.
Feeling what others are feeling
Knowing what others are feeling.
Cognitive: Mostly associated with engaging in helping others actively. If you feel what others feel (feeling), difficult to engage in helping them, interventions.
Supported by differend brain regions.
Empathy tasks entail asking participants
to consider the emotional state of
others and themselves in response to
emotion-eliciting situations, such as
those that evoke pain.
* Tasks may require watching another
individual’s emotional reaction or
imagining the reaction of others or
oneself in response to a painful action.
Measured in fmri.
Looking at people subjected to pain.
Do some people trigger more empathy in people.
More likely to feel empathy for people in our ingroups people we feel emotionally close to.
In orange we can see the brain regions that mediate the feeling component of empathy
(orange).
* These are distinct from those that mediate the
cognitive component of empathy (green).
Related with Theory-of-Mind.
Feeling: Orange, insula. Somatosensory cortex. ACC. Those are regions involved in feeling component of empathy.
Knowing; related to theory of mind. Can disscoiate your own mind from the minds and persepctivecs expetineces of others.
(Green)
Tempoparietal: Involved in representing mental states of other people.
These networks, in KNOWING, related to theory of mind, mentalizing.
Hur påverkar theory of mind våra sociala kunskaper?
An ability that requires representing what might
be going on in other people’s minds, allowing us
to attribute mental states to other people.
* Theory-of-mind tasks ask participants to reason
about the intentions and beliefs of others,
specifically false beliefs.
* Temporoparietal Junction: lesions within it
impair the ability to attribute beliefs to others
and that it is activated selectively when we
imagine the beliefs of somebody else.
* Medial prefrontal cortex is also important. This
region may have a role in the more controlled
processes of the ToM.
Representing what the others know about the world. Different from what I know about the world.
One needs to create tasks. Dissociate my beliefs of the world form other’s beliefs of the world. Around age of 4 in humans.
Tasks in children. The children are playing.
People that can’t dissociate: “She will look for the bear in the box” because they themself know it’s in the box.
MEDIAL prefrc. A lot of cognitive control. Conflict situations: Mediated by ACC, medial prefrc. Investiagted also in adults.
Jokes.
Area more active when two understandings of representations of the world are required.
A set of neurons (par opercularis) that appears to mirror the actions of other
people.
* When we watch someone performing a motor action (e.g., a goal-directed behavior
such as reaching for a glass of water), regions of our premotor cortex sometimes
responds as if we were performing the action ourselves.
The existence of neurons.
Mirror-enurones.
Active when one performs a task, looking at a pan, drinking a glass of water; and are also active when looking at others doing the same thing.
Description of their existence in primals.
Representations are input to mentalizing system. BEfore assigning to other. Brain simulates actions internally. Why did someone pick up the glass, brain simulates action of picking up glass. Mental representation.
Perception-action-coupling model – our brains’ mirroring of other people’s
actions reflects processes that enable us to vicariously experience other people’s
outwardly exhibited states.
* The outputs of this mirror-neuron system may be the inputs to the
mentalizing/theory-of-mind system: We may first generate motor
representations of how another person is performing an action (via simulation
and mirroring) and then use this representation in more flexible ways to infer the
reasons and intentions behind the observed action.
Hur beter hjärnan sig i sociala kontext
Social brain hypothesis – suggests that the size of people’s social
networks is related to brain region size such as the frontal lobe
Social network size is
correlated with
amygdala size
One stages doesn’t occur when another is complete. May overlap-
Other aspects of understanding the complexity of our social worlds.
Engagin in social interactions is very costful. We need to all the time interpret others,
Our cognitive system will use shortcuts. Allow us to navigate complexity of social world.
Interesting finding- how does this tag.
People that have bigger amuugdala - bigger interactions with people they network with.
Correlation
First Impressions
Baby-faced adults are
often assumed to be
honest, if somewhat
naive and bumbling.
We are very sensitive to round faces.
Baby-faces perople are perceived as more friendly.
Even seeing
Nonverbal behavior – ways that people behave, gesture, or
express themselves without words
o Thin-sliced judgments – evaluating people based on extremely brief
experiences
o People are very sensitive to nonverbal behavior.
o People can glean information from simple, moving arrays of dots arranged so that
each dot is placed where a person’s joints would be (point light walker).
Walking fast vs slow doesn’t show if a person is happy. or sad but sometimes we are good at understanding.
Very sensitive to nonverbal behavior.
The way a person is moving offers nonverbal behavior, judgement that we use when we intercat with someone.
Hur beter sig hjärnan mot ingroups vs outgroups?
People we believe to be close to us
Gender- race- even less relevant attributes.
Very esy. Playing on the red or blue team in soccer. Even if you don’t know anyone from before in your group, you put yourself into that group.
Entitativity and Empathy
* Entitativity – perceiving members of an out-group to be uniform
in their characteristics.
* Other race face effect – difficulty people have individuating and
recognizing people from an ethnicity different from their own.
* Entitativity makes it hard to empathize with people as individuals.
Evolutionary processes that are important for us.
Stereotypes, prejudice in in vs outgroups will not dominate our behavior. We don’t need to act depending on our stereotypes.
Impact from perception. Better at recognizing faces of our own race.
Perceive member from outgroups as more unifrom.
More dificulty in empathizing wih individual people from out grop- entitiativetiy.
Seeing “us versus them”
N170 is higher (stronger) when looking at people from other ingroup.
There is more activation is fusiform face area, amygdlaa, orbitofrontal.
This is most likely; More activation in these regions that make evaluations ; signaling to process a face further because it is more relevant to me.
Brain areas more active when
viewing images of in-group
than out-group faces included
(A) the fusiform gyri, (B) the
amygdala, and (C) the
orbitofrontal cortex.
Process of linking information based on events.
BEtter memory if it’s with people we like.
Even if you havenät seem the people together you make the shotcut that they are together. This type of inferences are important to learn about the world.
Memory Integration:
Episodic memory as a system that forms representations that integrate related experience
You’re going to play a memory game.
People assigned attributes to the characters so that their teammates should be dependning on similarities to themselves.
Girl - either teammate or not.
People are better with inferences - when its connected to someone they like. This is a person they “met” 20 minutes before.
Easy to create ingroups vs outgroups. Impact how well we can learn information.
The impact of reading something from people we loike vs don’t like in the world.
Hur skapar hjärnan stereotyper och fördomar?
Stereotypes are generalized characteristics ascribed to a social group, such as personal
traits (for example, intelligent) or circumstantial attributes (for example, poor).
* Dual-process theory of stereotypes:
* Stereotype activation: thinking of traits and characteristics that are commonly
associated with a particular social group. More automatic and more difficult to
inhibit and control.
* Stereotype application: evaluations, judgments, and behaviors toward people based
on our activated stereotypes. A more controlled processes, that can be inhibited.
* Prejudices are negative evaluations and prejudgments of others in accordance with
stereotypes.
* Despite the persistence of prejudices and stereotypes in contemporary society, people
frequently engage in self-regulatory processes to mitigate the effects of bias on their
behavior.
Doesn’t need to be things we have been exposed to all of our lives.
Ingroups and outgroups are often biased.
Generalized attributes ascribed to a social group (stereotype), intelligent, rich, poor.). Grow up, are exposed to them, difficult to not have them activated in social situations.
Brain also equipped with cognitive control. Activation in stereotype might not activate certain behavior- In your mind, things might be actiavye, but Acc can see the context, exert control to not behave or say certain things. Control application of stereotypes into behavior.
Prejudice: come with a n emotional value. Stereotypes do not have emotional value, but prejudice does.
Refulatory process mitigate the effects of bias.
Weapons Identification Task
Participants were asked to report whether each
briefly presented picture of an object was a
weapon or a tool.
- When the object was preceded by a briefly
presented Black face, people often mistook
the tool for a weapon.
- When the object was preceded by a White
face, people often perceived the weapon as a
tool.
- Although this occurred without intention,
some evidence suggests that people may be
able to exert control over such biases.
Big parts of research; use race.
Black vs white.
Works similar to stroop task.
tool primed by black or white face.
When the face is white. Many mistakes in recognizing the gun. When the prime is a black face, people are more likely to interpret the tool as a gun.
Happens independent of the race of the participant. Kind of a learned behavior.
This effect disappears if we suddenly have omre black faces. The brain stops evaluating.
The IAT reveals biases that people have when they associate social groups
(e.g., old people, Black people, women) with positive or negative evaluations.
* Based on the principle that interference or conflict slows the response time,
just like the Stroop Task.
* Implicit biases often emerge even among people who believe they hold no
preconceived notions about different groups.
Can be seen with many tasks.
A conflict, people need to solve conflict. When it’s more difficult.
Hur kan man förklara hjärnans stereotype network?
Anterior Temporal Lobe (ATL), the temporal
poles, represents stereotype-related knowledge.
This knowlegde is activated and biases first
impression formation in the brain (i.e.,
stereotypes in the Dorsal mPFC).
The lateral PFC (Inferior Frontal Gyrus – IFG),
associated with goal representation and
response inhibition, controls the application of
stereotypes to behavior.
The fact that we have stereoytpes does NOT mean it will be implemented into behavior.
We have inhibitory systems
Stereotypes: assigned attributes to. agro oup.
Information that we have saved/ stored in our brain.
Networks involved in semantic knowledge will be activated. Temporal pole. WIll bias first impressions,
IFG - will i tbe impleneted in behavior or not. Inhibits implementation of stereotypes into behavior. Stored as any type of knowledge.
Amygdala, Striatum and Orbitofrontal Cortex are
involved in the initial emotional evaluation
response (e.g., group membership).
The insula responses (empathy) are more
strongly activated in response to ingroups than
outgroups.
The ventral mPFC (mentalizing and perspective
taking) is also more engaged towards ingroup
than outgroup members.
Everything important for value: activated when prejudice is active in brain.
Comes with emotional activation.
Will bias how we empatchize we people.
How we mentalizine with people. More in ingroups in compared to outgroups. Feel more when there is a sidaster close to us vs far away.
The anterior cingulate cortex is involved in the
detection of conflict between biased tendencies
and internal goals or external cues.
The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), involved
in perspective taking and mentalizing, provides
further representation of interpersonal cues to
guide regulatory processing.
The dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex selects
appropriates responses and the inappropriate
responses are inhibited by the dorsal inferior
frontal gyrus. In this way, stereotypes and
prejudices are not implemented in behavior.
All these regions;
cognitive control regions.
Where you feel stereotypes active. When there is conflict (activate acc, there is conflict, brain alerted). In this situation, monitored by mpfc.
empathizing network will be activated
Dorsolateral prc activated selecting aspects that are important; focus on these aspects, and inhibit the prejudicial.
Like in a stroop task.
Conflicts that contradict each other: select attention on relevant part, inhibit other parts.
try to relate the ares to cognitive control
- also in stereotypes and prejudice.
