PSYCH 202 - Lecture Notes on Social Cognitive Neuroscience and Theory of Mind

As social animals, human survival depends on social interactions.
Humans must select mates, form alliances, compete for resources, and sometimes battle with other groups to survive and reproduce.
Alliances and support are important for psychological and physical well-being.
Accurate social decisions are crucial, considering group norms and standards of conduct, as violations might result in expulsion.
Disrupting social connections (e.g., ridicule, divorce, death) are among the most stressful events people endure.

A relatively new interdisciplinary field that combines social, developmental, and cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience.
It encompasses the empirical study of socio-emotional phenomena at three levels:
- Social: experience and behavior of individuals in social contexts.
- Cognitive: information processing mechanisms that give rise to these social phenomena.
- Neural: the brain systems that underlie these processes.

Social psychologists can use neuroscience data to test competing theories of the psychological processes underlying social phenomena.
It allows leveraging rich cognitive neuroscientific knowledge about brain systems underlying memory, attention, language, and emotion.

The same brain system may operate differently for social versus non-social information.
Motivations and social contexts influence cognitive processes.
Caution is needed when interpreting results of neuroimaging studies of higher-level cognitive processes, as they can be difficult to induce/emulate in the scanner.
What is labeled as ‘deception’ or ‘morality’ in the scanner can be quite different from everyday life.

Ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others to predict and explain behavior.
Also called: mind-reading, mentalizing.
It is a complex cognitive function that requires integration of information from many sources.

Beliefs, intentions, desires.
Unobservable and may be decoupled from reality (e.g., crayon is yellow vs. John believes the crayon is yellow).

‘Theory’ Theory (i.e., ‘folk psychology’):
- We have a commonsense understanding of other people’s behavior in terms of mental states (beliefs, desires, and intentions).
Simulation Theory (i.e., "putting myself in her shoes"):
- Understand other people’s states of mind by simulating how it would feel or remembering relevant experiences.
Likely that both are used.
- In different situations, theory or simulation may be more appropriate.

First-order false belief: Sally falsely believes the ball is in the basket.
Second-order false belief: If Sally had peeked in & seen Ann move the ball, Ann would have a false belief that Sally has a false belief that the ball is in the basket …. etc

Autism Spectrum Disorder is a complex, heterogeneous condition with a great deal of variability across autistic people.
Substantial evidence that autistic people show differences in theory of mind processing compared to neurotypicals.

Deficits only on ToM animations.
- Intentionality (degree they used mental state language).
- Appropriateness (of description).

ToM Motion > Random Motion.
- pSTS
- mPFC
Group comparison: ASD group has reduced blood flow (activation) in ToM regions such as STS and mPFC.

Posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) are prime candidates for this process.
pSTS involved in:
- gaze perception & eye movement observation
- representing the world from different visual perspectives
Knowing where a person is looking and what they can see, given their vantage point, enables us to:
- know what they are looking at
- identify the cause of their reaction
In autism, no additional activity when gaze in unexpected direction

Localiser task: Use false belief > false photograph paradigm to localise regions most responsive to ToM task
TPJ active in non-social tasks where it is necessary to redirect attention to relevant stimuli.
Two tasks:
- False belief task
- Cueing task
Suggests TPJ not selective for ToM.
- (A) fMRI of false belief task
  - Found TPJ & other regions active for false beliefs>false photos.
    - (1) TPJ; (2) MPFC; (3) Precuneus
- (B) fMRI of attentional cueing task
  - Examined activity in regions from (A)
  - Only TPJ showed attention effect.

TASK: Form impression of personality OR: Pay attention to order of statements
- Impression > Order
mPFC also activated by thinking about ourselves -- self-knowledge, trait descriptions, autobiographical memory.
Likely reflects the process of simulation: we predict what someone else will think and feel in a situation by considering what we would think and feel if we were in their situation.
3 areas of mPFC:
- Dorsal mPFC
- Anterior/ventral mPFC
- Orbital mPFC
Studies involving ToM (mentalizing) activated anterior/ventral mPFC (BA10).
BUT it's not so clear cut.
Some ToM tasks activate orbital or dorsal mPFC

Hynes et al. noted that ToM studies tending to engage orbital mPFC were those requiring one to think about how another feels.
They tested this hypothesis directly by comparing emotional ToM and cognitive ToM.

Can’t use the self as a model if the person we are trying to mentalize about is dissimilar to us.
Provided participants with descriptions of two target individuals: One target person was liberal and one was conservative.
Post-scan: assessed how similar subjects felt to the liberal person.
- If they felt similar to the liberal: liberal trials = “similar ToM” and conservative trials = “dissimilar” ToM (and vice versa).
Activity in anterior/ventral mPFC greatest when thinking about a similar other.
Dorsal mPFC activity greatest when thinking about a dissimilar other.
Functional subdivisions of mPFC: region activated depends on specific ToM task.