Does Social Neuroscience Contribute to social cognition?9.00 Robin Dunbar : Evolution and the social brain

9.50 Cecilia Heyes : Mirror Neurons: From Origins to Function

11.00 Ian Apperly : Controlled and automatic mindreading in children and adults

11.50 Claus Lamm : Empathy, Prosocial and Moral Behavior

13.40 Karin Roelofs : Neuroendocrine mechanisms of social behavior

14.50 Debate

Does Social Neuroscience Contribute to social cognition?Debate with all speakersDiscussant: Klaus FiedlerModerator: Frank Van Overwalle

Goal of Social neuroscience

• Social neuroscience integrates ideas from multiple research areas in psychology and neuroscience to address questions about social processes in the mind and brain

• New descipline since around 2005

Dedicated societies

• ESAN: European Social Affective Neuroscience (2008)

• SANS: Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (2008)

• S4SN: Society for Social Neuroscience (2010)

Dedicated journals

Approaches (Amodio, Social

Cognition, 2010)

Social Brain Mapping•Where are high-level social psychological processes located in the brain?

•By scanning participants’ brains, we study the neural basis of …• romantic love while viewing pictures of significant others > strangers (Aron

et al., 2005). • self while judging whether trait adjectives describe the self > another person

(Kelley et al., 2002; Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005).• social information processing while judging animate > inanimate objects

(Mitchell, Heatherton, & Macrae, 2002).

•Question: do we identify the critical processes and brain areas?

Approaches

Social Brain MappingMirror / Mentalizing Networks specialized for social processing

Approaches

Social Brain Mapping•Since processing in the brain creates / requires memory traces, it is legitimate to ask where high-level psychological processes are located (eliminating subsidiary processes)

•Motivation:

Social Brain Hypothesis

•Dedicated methods:

• fMRI Adaptation

• fMRI Pattern analysis

Approaches

Social Brain MappingHowever, the brain is an economic device, using very similar areas for social and non-social processing, showing some overlap of…

•ToM -and- attention reorientation in TPJ

•High abstract thinking on people -and- objects in mPFCVery

exciting !

Approaches (Amodio, Social

Cognition, 2010)

Social Hypothesis Testing•The use of new methods for assessing psychological variables instead of RT or cognitive load manipulations

• ERP: event-related potentials

• fMRI: functional magnetic resonance imaging & related methods

Approaches

Social Hypothesis Testing•A single core trait inference system: implicit/spontaneous activations when reading behaviors are extended under explicit/intentional instructions to infer a trait from behaviors

Approaches

Social Hypothesis Testing•The application of methods from behavioral research is often limited:

• RT (because presentation takes longer)

• Cognitive load (because secondary task activates other areas of no interest)

• Interactions (do not show summation of waves in ERPs)

Questions for debate

1. What are the major contributions (success stories) of social neuroscience to the understanding of social behavior?• What have we discovered anew?

• What have neuroimaging methods contributed over and above behavioral methods such as RT?

2. What are the major disappointments of social neuroscience (and is it possible to do something about it)?

3. Future: What are threats and critical issues / questions

The debate

In a first round,

• each of the speakers addresses one or more of these three questions in a short contribution (maximum 3-5 minutes)

• the discussant focuses on what he considers the most critical points in social neuroscience. He also addresses some of the points raised in the first round (maximum 10 minutes)

In a second round,

• all speakers may interact and respond to the discussant’s critique, and he may respond as well (later or interactively)

• the public may joint in at this point as well.