PSYC3010 Social Cognition Notes

Natural Selection: Small variations in populations lead to differential reproductive success, favoring individuals best adapted to their environments.
Social Brain Hypothesis: Primates have large brains relative to body size due to the cognitive demands of social behaviors.
Ecological vs. Social Hypotheses:
- Ecological: Large brains are a byproduct of demands like foraging and tool use.
- Social: Large brains reflect enhanced social skills developed through social competition, giving individuals survival advantages like deception and alliance formation.
- Social brain hypothesis (strict sense): Social skills give direct survival advantage to the group and indirectly to the individual

Definition: Involves affective state in oneself, isomorphism with another's state, elicitation of one's state upon observing another, and knowing the source of one's state.
Requisites: Affective state in self, isomorphism, own affective state elicited by other, self-other distinction.
Related Concepts:
- Sympathy: Emotional response congruent with other's feelings, but not necessarily isomorphic.
- Mentalizing: Drawing inferences about others' mental states.
- Empathic concern/Compassion: Similar to sympathy but involves a motivation to act.
- Emotion contagion: Mimicking others' expressions, lacking self-other distinction.
Measurement:
- Questionnaires like Empathy Quotient and Interpersonal Reactivity Index (with subscales for Perspective Taking, Empathic Concern, Personal Distress, and Fantasy).
- Neural correlates through simulation theories.
Mirror Neurons: Neurons active during both performing and observing an action.
- In humans, evidence is indirect (e.g., fMRI).
Simulation Theories: Understanding others by activating corresponding neural representations to their states.
Shared Neural Circuits: Observing emotions activates representations of those states in the observer.
- Involves the "Pain Matrix," including the insula and anterior cingulate cortex.

Definition: Ability to reason about and attribute mental states to others.
Assessment: Evaluated using tasks like the Sally-Anne task, testing false belief understanding.
Intentionality: Explaining behavior in terms of mental states.
Abilities Enabled: Inferring thoughts, feelings, intentions, attributing responsibility, lying, teaching.
Neural Basis:
- Temporal Poles: Memory and semantic memory, generating social/emotional context schemas.
- Medial Prefrontal Cortex (mPFC): Thinking about people and their minds, pragmatics of language, inferring feelings, binding information to create a “social event.”
- Temporal-parietal Junction (TPJ): Attribution of mental states, self-other distinction.

Theory of Mind: Individuals with autism often struggle with false belief tasks; while deficits are present, they are not sufficient to explain the condition.
Empathy: Impaired empathy is widely accepted, but underlying causes are debated; evidence for impaired "simulation/emotion sharing" is mixed.

Neural Pruning: Brain undergoes radical changes involving pruning of excess gray matter.
Maturation Pattern: Physical movement, vision, and senses mature first; frontal regions controlling higher thinking mature later (early 20s).
Prefrontal Cortex: Final area to mature, responsible for rational and executive functions like planning, problem-solving, emotional control, and inhibitory control.

Specialized Skills: Focus on what skills evolved to support human social behaviors and how they're reflected in brain differences.
ToM as Candidate: Theory of Mind is a primary candidate for a unique cognitive capacity.
Intentionality Inference: Grey matter volume in PFC correlates with intentionality inference competences.