Building blocks for Social Interaction

What is cognition?

Information-processing mechanisms that take inputs about the world and generate outputs such as experience and behaviour

What is social congition?

Cognitive processes involved in processing “social” information, including information about oneself and others

Give examples of social cognition processes

Communicating/ sending social information

Perceving and attending to social information:

Gaze

Motion

Facial expressions and emotions

Give examples of self-other processes

Predicting and responding to others’ intentions and feelings:

Theory of Mind

Empathy

Self/ other control- switching between representations of self and others

What does minimal social information reveal about social cognition?

Social inference can occur with very little information, and people tend to automatically attribute social meaning to behaviour

What are different methods and technologies used to measure psychological and behavioural responses in research settings?

Objective responses (self-report)

Behaviour (keyboard- tracking responses/ RTs)

Autonomic measures (physiological responses like heart rate)

Brain responses (neuroimaging)

Non-verbal behaviour (facial expressions, body language, posture)

Computational modelling (cognitive processes)

Eye movements (gaze tracking)

Why might these methods be useful?

People can’t comment on their own biases

May help with demand characteristics

What are some experimental approaches to social cognition?

Holding stimuli constant then manipulate task as social or non-social

Manipulate social vs non-social stimuli, hold the task constant

Include non-social in social cognition experiments

What does Hadley, Naylor Hamilton’s (2022) hierarchical framework of social cognition and behaviour demonstrate

How different levels of processing work together in social interactions

What is the top level of this hierarchical structure for organising behaviour?

General cognition- broad cognitive functions

What is the middle levels of this hierarchical structure for organising behaviour?

Motor system: eye movement, facial action production, speech production, body movement

Perceptual system: gaze perception, face perception, speech perception, body perception

What is the behavioural levels of this hierarchical structure for organising behaviour?

The actual motor and sensory behaviours (eyes, facial muscles, speech, gesture, body) and inputs (visual, auditory, somatosensory)

What is the bottom level of this hierarchical structure for organising behaviour?

Specific meanings- particular social messages

General categories- broader social functions (affiliation, communication, social hierarchy and attention)

Why may coupling modalities be useful?

Can disambiguate meaning of disparate behaviours in one modality

How are language and non-verbal behaviour connected and what does it enable?

Mirror neuron system and enables mimicry and imitation in social interactions

What do social meaning models (WHY?) focus on?

Why people or animals interact the way they do, and the functions of behaviours

What is the signalling framework?

One person encodes meaning in an action; others decode it. Agreement is not always guaranteed because meaning depends on context and observer

What are behavioural rules (WHEN)?

Simple input-output rules for navigating interactions (e.g. “when X, do Y”) flexible and not innate

What do rich cognition models (HOW?) propose?

Behaviour is guided by high-level representations of other’s needs and knowledge- core to Theory of Mind

Is Theory of Mind always necessary for behaviour?

Not always; people may use shortcuts (rules) and switch between strategies

What is the debate about domain-general vs domain-specific processes?

Whether social behaviour relies on general cognitive mechanisms or specialised modules

What is the social brain hypothesis (Dunbar, 1998)

Sociality evolved as a survival strategy; brain structures support managing social relationships

Was their evidence of a “social brain”?

Dunbar found a correlation between neocortex size relative to the rest of the brain and average social group size across primate species

According to Dunabr’s Model, what is the predicted human social group size?

Plateaus around 150 individuals (refered to as “Dunbar’s number”)

How is sociality a survival strategy?

It optimises securing resources that are necessary for growth, reproduction and protection

What four networks are linked to activation of emotion

Executive network

Salience network

Mirroring network

Mentalising network

Do social brain regions only handle social tasks?

No; many “social” brain areas also perform non-social processes (domain-general overlap)

What are mirroring and mentalising networks?

Systems involved in imitation and understanding others’ states

Is social cognition uniquely human?

There is evidence of homologous brain areas for tracking self-vs-other information but aspects such as theory of mind may be unique to humans

What areas of study help us understand developmental change in social cognition?

Evidence of early social biases and how these change over development; insights from atypical development

What are examples of instinctive human behaviours

Infant crying and sucking; possible innate fears (e.g. greater pupil dilation for spiders vs flowers in 6 month olds)

Do newborn infants recognise faces across viewpoints?

Yes- infants as young as 1-3 days old can recognise identities across different perspectives

What did Johnson (2005) find about early social biases?

2 month old babies rotated head towards configurations that looked like faces a lot more in the first 30 days (compared to faces made up of peculiar faces)