Week 11 - Social Cognition

Question 1

Ned and Oscar are in the pub on a Saturday afternoon. Ned is upset as he and his partner have been trying to start a family and they continue to be unsuccessful. Oscar feels sad for this friend and tries to comfort him.

A specific social cognition brain network would be strongly engaged in this situation. Identify one key node of this network.

a) Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex
b) Anterior insula
c) Posterior superior temporal sulcus
d) Orbitofrontal cortex

Answer 1

B. Anterior insula

Question 2

What is Social cognition or social behaviour?

Answer 2

The investigation of social knowledge und the cognitive processes that are involved when individuals construct their subjective reality
● Encoding, Saving & Retrieval of Social Information
● Representation & Structure of social knowledge
● Judgment and Decision-Making processes
Source: Fielder & Bless (2003)
● Social Judgments are dependent on situational cues AND prior knowledge AND processing capacity
● Top-down (Knowledge) AND Bottom-up (stimulus) Processing
● Processes: How automatic or controlled are these processes

Schema: Cognitive Representation
Social Schema: includes the elements of a social object
Schemas are organized in memory in an associative network
Schemas: Categories, Stereotypes, Scripts

Activation of a Schema → LEADS TO → Activation of associated schemas
Schemas can thereby influence the perceptions and thought processes in other situations.
(regardless of how true or false the schemas are)

Question 3

WHAT IS SPECIAL ABOUT SOCIAL COGNITION & BEHAVIOR?

Answer 3

● People change over (a) time & (b) circumstance
● A social stimulus can change upon being the target of cognition
● People perceive back - social cognition is mutual cognition
● As the target is similar to oneself, it may provide information about oneself
● A person’s traits are unobservable and are vital to thinking about them
● Persons intentionally influence the environment
● The accuracy of one’s cognitions are more difficult to verify
● People are unavoidably complex

Question 4

Socialness in non-social stimuli

Answer 4

●Pioneering investigations on attributions of causality
Fritz Heider & Marianne Simmel (1944)
Albert Michotte (1946)

●Very simple displays (moving geometrical figures) give rise to high-level percepts (causality, animacy)

●Attribution of intentions, agency and emotions to non-social stimuli

Question 5

The social mind: processes

Attentional filtering

Answer 5

We cannot consciously process all the information arriving at our senses.
●Selectivity in attentional processing means that our representations of social entities is always incomplete.
●They can be incomplete in trivial or significant ways.

Question 6

The social mind: processes

Inference

Answer 6

When we perceive the world, we regularly go beyond the stimuli or information provided in the environment by drawing on our knowledge and previous experience.
●Inferences are made when information is ambiguous or missing.
●Inferences enrich representations but also risk misrepresenting actual reality.

Question 7

The social mind: processes

Motivated distortion

Answer 7

The construction of mental representations are subject to motivational pressures.
●Transform objective reality into more gratifying forms.
● Representations are vulnerable to being shaped by the distortions of wishful thinking.

Question 8

The social mind: representations

Associative network models

Answer 8

Mental representations consist of associations between sematic nodes (low level concepts).
●Feature nodes linked to central target-identity node.
●Pattern and strength of connection between depends on importance and centrality of features

Question 9

The social mind: representations

Schema models

Answer 9

Mental representations are richly structured
●Schemas differ from mere associations as they specify causal and spatial relations between the feature elements
●Structure of schema abstracted from multiple experiences with what is being represented

Question 10

The social mind: representations

exemplar models

Answer 10

A different view from schema based theoretical models.
●Here, mental representations are grounded in specific instances/exemplars.
●Activation of category brings to specific category members.
●Emphasizes flexibility & context-sensitivity of representations.

Question 11

The social mind: representations

Distributed memory models

Answer 11

●Mental representations are transitory states, rather than enduring entities.
●Similar views of nodes, connections & flow of activation.
●Low level units (nodes) participate in multiple distinct mental representations via different patterns of activation

Question 12

Core Processes of Person Perception

Automatic inferences

Answer 12

Perceivers make immediate and automatic assumptions about the psychological traits and states of the actors they observe in the social environment

Question 13

Core processes of person perception

Social projection

Answer 13

Perceivers use self-knowledge to make judgments about the states and traits of others.
●It is subject to in-group/out-group biases

Question 14

Core processes of person perception

Social stereotyping

Answer 14

●Perceptually available cues are used to categorize a person based on the social group membership
●Process: category selection -> stereotype selection -> stereotype application
●Age, sex, ethnicity, religion, etc.

Question 15

Perceiving relationships

Interdependence theory

Answer 15

●How much does a person’s outcomes depend on another person’s actions?
●Is the social influence mutual or assymmetric? (power dynamics)
●How much so the different actors’ interests conflict or coincide?
●How much behavioral coordination is required for successful outcomes?

Question 16

Dysfunctions. Of. Social cognition

Answer 16

Social cognitive deficits appear to be a core cognitive phenotype of many developmental, neurological and psychiatric disorders.

●There is a need to raise awareness of the importance of these difficulties among clinicians, researchers and patients alongside the more established aspects of cognition that may be negatively affected, such as attention and memory.

Question 17

Social perception

Answer 17

FACE PERCEPTION (key region: FFA)

● Prosopagnosia – face blindness
● Face specificity: Prosopagnosics show impairments only for the category faces

EMOTIONS (Key region: Amygdala)

Social cues (key region: posterior STS)
● Direction of gaze
● Head movement
● Mouth movement
● Lip reading
● Hand movement
● Body movement
● Implied motion
● Intentional actions

Question 18

Social behaviour

Answer 18

Dysexecutive syndrome / frontal lobe syndrome

The case of Phineas Gage
● Symptoms:
oSocially inappropriate behavior
oPersonality changes
oDisinhibition
oImpulsivity
oInability to plan for the future
oInability to follow rules,