This course provides a thorough background in the newly emerging field of social cognitive neuroscience. A broad range of social phenomena is examined at multiple levels. First, at the social level including experience and behaviors. Second, at the cognitive level which deals with information processing systems. And lastly, at the neural level which deals with brain/neuronal bases of the first two levels. Topics include joint action, animal and human communication, and altered social functioning in neurological and psychiatric disorders. These topics are discussed at both general and specific (article) levels.
Welcome to Social Neurocognition, where we will explore answers to questions like “Why do we have such big brains?”, “What made Homo Erectus develop into an ultra-social species?”, and my personal favorite “How do we understand one another, allowing us to have class in the first place?”. In this lecture, we will discuss the need for social neurocognition research, showing for instance that the (social) world as we know it is not a given but continues to evolve from interacting minds. To get started, I recommend reading the chapter from the late Nicholas Humphrey, featuring an intriguing analogy in the opening paragraphs between natural selection and the production line of the Model T Ford.
In this lecture, we will zoom in on the cognitive challenges facing a social organism in an ever-evolving cultural niche. As usual, we will take an evolutionary perspective and take a closer look at what pressures on (social) brain development those challenges must have had. Finally, we will examine the functional neuroanatomy of the social brain, assessing which brain areas are particularly sensitive to social cognitive demands.
In this lecture, we will take a comparative stance to see what we can learn from the other great apes about uniquely human social cognitive abilities.
In this lecture, we will discuss the Nobel prize-earning framework of Game Theory, which aims to explain real-world attractor states of heightened competition (e.g., race to the bottom), but also raises the question of why most people spontaneously choose to cooperate instead.
In this lecture, we will equip an artificial cognitive agent with probabilistic reasoning abilities, and assess what obstacles it would face in human interaction.
For the second module of the course, we will look into what it means to have a human-grade "understanding of mind". How do we develop it, and how might we lose it as seems to be the case in certain psychiatric and neurological disorders? We will kick off this module with work from Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who's one of the great minds behind the cooperative breeding hypothesis. Her 2009 book Mothers and Others comes highly recommended if you want to expand your knowledge base beyond the below 2020 paper in understanding how we became such other-regarding apes.
In this lecture, we will focus on the cognitive hardware and software that allow us to make sense of each other and ourselves in terms of subjective states and mental processes.
In this lecture, we will discuss Piaget's developmental stages and Vygotsky's zone of proximal development to understand how children bootstrap their way into an ultrasocial human world.
In this lecture, we will zoom in on theories and data on Autism Spectrum Disorder, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social-communication deficits we still understand very little about.
In this lecture, we will look into what neurodegenerative diseases like frontotemporal dementia can teach us about human brain organization and social cognition.
In this lecture, we will discuss insights obtained from split-brain and prefrontal lesion patients into our social cognitive abilities.
Communication is often explained in terms of sending and receiving messages, presupposing that people already share the same set of rules for inserting and extracting meaning from those messages. This may hold true in the animal world, where a South African honeybee signaling the location of a flower patch would be immediately understood in a New Zealand beehive. As we will see, human communication is different. We employ our words and gestures in virtually infinite ways, frequently in a vague or nonliteral manner. Yet our conversation partner can usually grasp the intended meaning of our utterance at its first occurrence, thanks to its context of use in an ongoing interaction. How people define what counts as context, and how context determines the meaning of an utterance, are questions that mark a fundamental gap in our understanding of how humans communicate. In this third module, we will explore potential answers to these questions.
In this lecture, we will discuss models of human dialogue and how they can be interrogated empirically.
In this lecture, we will test the hypothesis that people in dialogue understand one another because they jointly develop and coordinate a shared conceptual space that provides critical context for using and interpreting communicative signals.
In this lecture, we will critically discuss the concept of interpersonal synchrony in the context of human social interaction studies.
In this lecture, we will be putting communication back in context as well as the context in communication, asking fundamental questions like "What is in a signal?" and "What counts as context?".
For our final lecture, we will work toward a synthesis of Social Neurocognition and define outstanding conceptual and empirical challenges in the field.