thinking about others Flashcards
Prosopagnosia
Damage to occipitotemporal cortex
Unable to recognise familiar faces, including own face
Dorsal visual stream
Concerned with locating objects
Where pathway
Occipital to parietal lobes
Ventral visual stream
Concerned with identifying objects
What pathway
Occipital to temporal lobes
Occipital face area (OFA)
Specialised for faces
Responds to both upright and inverted faces
Defined by greater responses to faces than non facial categories
Sensitive to changes in physical features
Fusiform face area (FFA)
Specialised for faces
Responds more to upright faces
Defined by greater responses to faces than non facial categories
Sensitive to changes in identity
Superior temporal sulcus (STS)
Responds to faces and bodies
Also responds to other stimuli like bodies and eye gaze
Changeable aspects of faces but not identity
Evidence for face-specificity hypothesis in FFA
FFA responds more to faces than non-face categories
Activation to faces is more consistent and much more robust than face-selective activity in OFA and STS
Evidence isn’t conclusive
FFA - A question of expertise
We become experts at face discrimination through prolonged experience
FFA sensitive to expert within category visual discrimination
Greebles test - Gauthier (1999)
Participants go through rigorous training to identify greebles
Increased response in FFA to upright vs inverted greebles
Real world expertise - Gauthier (2000)
Increased FFA activity for cars compared to birds when looking at car experts
Vice versa for bird experts
Case study R.M. - Sergent & Signoret (1992)
Prosopagnosic
Could still identify variety of minature cars
Face perception and within-category expertise is not the same and can’t be compared
FFA - Only important for face processing?
Haxby and colleagues argued that response to objects in FFA might be important too
Prosopagnosia and visual agnosia speak against this idea
Double dissociation Calder & Young (2005)
Double dissociation needed for separate routes for identity and expression
Impaired recognition of facial identity but not other cues (name, voice) with preserved facial expression recognition
Emotional response to familiar faces
Emotional response to neutral familiar faces can be measured by skin conductance response (SCR) - automatic and unconscious
Familiar faces elicit greater SCT than unfamiliar faces, even in prosopagnosics!!!
Capgras delusion
Believe familiar people have been replaced by an imposter
What can eye gaze tell us about another person?
Signals where someone is looking and where they are putting their attention
Joint attention
Ability to use gesture and eye contact to coordinate attention with another person to share experience of an object or an event
Direct gaze
Babies as young as four days old prefer direct gaze to averted gaze
Speakers who make eye contact rated more pleasant and less nervous
Can also be a sign of aggression, dominance and threat
Averted gaze
Signals attention oriented elsewhere
Important cue for information in environment
Effect of eye gaze on facial expression
Anger recognised faster with direct gaze, fear with averted gaze
Gaze cueing
Averted gaze cues trigger automatic shift of attention, even when an observer is trying to ignore the cue
Top down modulation of gaze cueing
Mental state attribution affects rapid, reflexic components of gaze following
Brain mechanisms for processing eye gaze - Perrett et al (1985, 1992)
Cells in superior temporal sulcus responsive to faces or heads are also to head orientation
Subset of cells sensitive to head orientation are also sensitive to gaze direction
Posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and eye gaze
pSTS seems involved when different gaze direction signal different social intentions
pSTS responded more to eye gaze that was incongruent with participants’ expectations
Amygdala and eye gaze
Patient with amygdala lesions will not look at eyes in social interactions
Eye gaze as cue for mental states - brain networks
pSTS, medial prefrontal cortex and amygdala
Eye gaze as cue for environmental states - brain networks
Inferior parietal cortex and anterior superior temporal sulcus
Autism and eye gaze
Reduced eye contact - diagnostic criteria for autism
Absence of joint attention
Children with autism have difficulty understanding the social significance of eye gaze
What is theory of mind
Understanding the mental states of others
Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?
Language trained chimpanzee shown videos of familiar human facing obstacles in certain situations then shown two pictures, one of which represented a solution
Chimp consistently chose correct item
Interpreted as evidence that chimp understood actor’s goal HOWEVER interpretation has been criticised
False belief task - true test of theory of mind
False beliefs are when someone else holds a mental state different from one’s own and from the current state of reality
False beliefs are important because they exist only in the other’s mind - they don’t reflect reality but only the other’s beliefs about reality
Development over time reflected in false belief task
Most 3 year old children are egocentric and make errors on false belief task
By 4 to 5 years, can answer false belief tasks correctly
Theory-theory
Store concepts and principles about mental states and how they affect behaviour
Simulation theory
Reason about others’ mental states based on our own mental states and even stimulations
Modularity account
Specific module for theory of mind
Specific set of brain regions
Two system model
Low level system which gives rise to implicit theory of mind
High level system based on reasoning and explicit representation of mental states
Theory of mind in adults
Adults allow their own knowledge to bias their mental state attribution to others
When attributing mental states under uncertainty, adults use heuristic that other people are similar to themselves
Overcoming egocentric bias is cognitively effortful
Executive function
Set of cognitive processes involved in flexible goal-directed behaviour
Language and mental state attribution
Language ability in typically developing children predicts success on false belief task, irrespective of age
Deaf children with delayed language acquisition also show delays in succeeding on false belief tasks
Shows that language is important for development of mental state attribution
Once normal theory of mind has developed, language does not appear to play a critical role
Set of brain regions engaged for mental state attribution stories
Medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)
Temporoparietal junction (TPJ)
Temporal pole (TP)
mPFC damage and theory of mind
Amount of damage to mPFC was correlated with performance on faux pas task
Right TPJ
rTPJ involved in reasoning about mental states, relative to closely matched reasoning tasks without mental content
