week 8 Flashcards
What is social brain
Humans are extremely social – we have a repertoire of social cognitive abilities that guide interactions
The Social Brain Hypothesis suggests our sociality had a big influence on our brain evolution
Importance of theory of mind
the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others, andto understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that may be different from ones own
What is theory of mind
Understanding the mental states of others
Intentions
Desires
Knowledge
Beliefs
Why is theory of mind important
Enables us to interpret, predict, manipulate others’ behaviour
Central to many abilities that are though to be uniquely human
Communication, cooperation, culture
Essential to successful social interaction – allows us to make sense of the behaviour of others in many contexts
The study of theory of mind
Roots in animal work
Premack and Woodruff (1978) “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?”
[Think back to social brain hypothesis]
Now: thriving area of research in social, cognitive, developmental, and clinical psychology, as well as neuroscience
Theory of Mind Brain Regions: Experimental Tasks
Participants in fMRI scanner instructed to read the passage silently and answer the question internally
Participants in fMRI scanner instructed to look at each image and consider the meaning
mPFC was the only region uniquely activated by theory of mind tasks
Mediates ability to attribute mental states
Activation of this region was independent of modality (stories vs. cartoons)
What brain regions are engaged/activated by ToM tasks?
mPFC:
Support second-order representations (could be social or non-social)
Accessing personal knowledge/ simulating what one would do
Precuneus:
Activated during visuo-spatial imagery; episodic memory – retrieving previous images/ experiences
TPJ:
Lower-level processes – e.g. reorienting attention to salient stimuli
Higher-level cognitive processing tasks
Temporal poles/STS:
Storage and recollection of “social scripts” – knowledge about the world/people
development of theory of mind
Infancy-Some evidence of implicit grasp of theory-of-mind
Anticipatory looking
18 months- basic understanding of intentions, desires. Little understanding beliefs. Behavioural tasks
4 years- understand that others have beliefs that can differ yours. Verbal tasks
Adolescence, adulthood- Continued improvements in perspective taking skills. Computerised measures
theory of mind in autism
Criticisms of claim that autistic people lack ToM
Lack of ToM may not be specific to autistic people – other groups also fail False Belief tasks
Lack of ToM not a universal characteristic of autism
Many autistic individuals pass ToM tasks – performance can be predicted by language comprehension skills
Performance on ToM tasks fails to predict performance on socio-communicative tasks/measures
Autistic traits; everyday social skills; peer relations; social attention
Longitudinal MRI study of early brain development in autism
89 toddlers
MRI scan at 36 months – amygdala volume
Final clinical evaluation at 48 months
brain network differences in autism
10 autistic adults, 10 non-autistic adults (Castelli et al. 2002)
Viewed series of animations
Asked: ‘What was happening in this animation?’
Coded degree of mental state attribution; appropriateness; length of description
Autistic participants:
fewer, less accurate interpretations of animations
Less activation in key parts of the mentalizing brain network
Differences in social attention
Eye-tracking study with autistic (n=12) and non-autistic (n=15) adults and adolescents
Both groups show preference for scene with person
Superficially typical preference for social information in both groups
Autistic group: less strong/absent preference for social information within scene with person
Subtle differences that may lead to differences in real-life scenarios
Effective information sharing In autism
Double empathy problem: bidirectional disconnect in communication and understanding between autistic and non-autistic people
Autistic people effectively share information with each other
Challenges the diagnostic criterion that autistic people lack the skills to interact successfully
