SOCIAL BRAIN · How does our brain learn to be social?
FP7 — People (Marie Curie Actions)
- Duration
- 2009-12-01 → 2011-11-30
- EU contribution
- €168,717
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MC-IEF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
How does our brain learn to be social?
How and why do people learn to be social and what is the role of interaction therein? The burgeoning field of social neuroscience has begun to illuminate the complex biological bases of human social cognitive abilities. Many investigations have focused, in particular, on the neural correlates of our capacity to grasp the mental states of others. Two neuroanatomically distinct large-scale networks have gained center stage as the neural substrates of social cognition: the so-called “mirror neuron system” (MNS) and the “mentalising network” (MENT). The former has been taken as evidence for a simulationist account of social cognition and is believed to give us a “first-person grasp” of the motor goals and intentions of other individuals. The latter has been seen as providing evidence for a “Theory Theory” account of social cognition believe to give us an inferential, reflective (and what might be called a ‘third-person’) grasp of others’ mental states. The apparent disparity between these sets of results may, however, arise from differences in the experimental paradigms used, which run the danger of presupposing the very theoretical frameworks they claim to test. Consequently, both of these paradigms are investigating actual, but limited domains of social cognition. Both are, in effect, committed to spectator theories of knowledge. They have focused on the use of “isolation paradigms”, in which participants are required to merely observe others or think about their mental states rather than participate in social interaction with them. Consequently, it has remained unclear whether and how activity in the large-scale neural networks described above is modulated by the degree to which a person does or does not feel actively involved in an ongoing interaction and whether the networks might subserve complementary or mutually exclusive roles in this case. In a recent paper that outlines the core theoretical assumptions of the project (Schilbach & Timmermans et al. 2012 Behav Brain Sci), we propose an approach to the investigation of social cognition focused on ‘second-person’ engagements and interaction. This approach, we argue, will help social neuroscience to really go social. The figure below lists crucial dimensions along which a “second-person” approach could develop. In this project, we focused primarily on 2 aspects: in paradigms of type [5], participants are engaged in dynamic interaction with one another, and behaviour of both participants is analysed, which we did for people with High Functioning Autism partnered with healthy control participants. Paradigms of type [2] do not allow for dynamics to develop, but allow a participant to see the effect of their behaviour on others, which makes for a more controllable experimental environment.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
People are per definition social animals. Some even argue that the main reason the human brain is so developed is precisely to support the intricate skills required for successful interactions with others in an increasingly complex social environment. Today, our globalized society indeed requires us to adopt different modes of social interaction in different social contexts, whether this is during a meeting, down at the pub, on Facebook, or in your own household. Whereas some of the required skills are presumably innate (e.g., neonate imitation), the vast majority of such skills are learned through culture and education. In this light, our central hypothesis is that people learn to interact socially with their peers. Congruently, the project aims at identifying the mechanisms through which this learning occurs, and propose that these mechanisms are largely similar to those found to be at play in cognitive paradigms such as implicit learning. Relevant questions that will be addressed include: How do we learn to monitor and to some degree control others’ emotional state? How do we build up our “social grammars” — the informal set of rules we follow when interacting with others? Is the knowledge that subtends such “social grammars” conscious or unconscious? Specifically, we will investigate (1) to what degree people learn such social grammars unconsciously, and what happens when they are made conscious of the rules of the grammar; (2) what makes this social learning special – to what degree does it differ from other forms of learning; (3) which brain regions subtend unconscious learning of social interactions (as compared to conscious or non-social learning); (4) whether there is a difference in the degree to which unconscious or conscious social learning breaks down in pathologies such as autism and schizophrenia, in which patients are specifically impaired when it comes to social interaction.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- KLINIKUM DER UNIVERSITAET ZU KOELN · KoelnCoordinatorGermany
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union