Rebecca Saxe (2006)
Uniquely human social
cognition
Current Opinion in
Neurobiology, 16, 235-239
Foundational capacities are the only aspects of human social cognition that are not uniquely human they are
shared by preverbal infants , apes and monkeys
• Recognise
co specifics
• Monitor
others' actions
• Engage
in contingent interactions
• Understand basic mental states such as goals and
actions (apes and preverbal children (see also Meltzoff & Decety, 2003) for preverbal children)
What aspects of social cognition are uniquely human?
However, apes and monkeys
and very young infants do not have the following two social
cognition competences
1. Theory of
Mind ( Temporo-parietal junction TPJ)
P235 being able to ' distinguish between the object of a mental
state
what a person's
mental state is about , the state of affairs to which the belief or perceptions
refers) and the content. (How that state of affairs is represented, what the
person believes or perceives to be true of it). KRO for project work the
object, state of affairs would be
the task and the understanding that group cohesion needs to be
maintained in order to make progress with the task. 'Command of this
distinction enables older children to understand how people's mental
representations of the world might differ from the way the world really is' KRO
or that it differs from their own understanding of it I.e. Saxe ( shown as italics) would extend the 2003
definition by Meltzoff & Decety ' To become a sophisticated mentalist one
needs to analyse both the similarities and differences between one's own states
and those of others' as they refer to an object,state of affairs
2. Joint attention (medial prefrontal
cortex MPFC) - mental representations with a three place (triadic) structure ie
triadic social relations
'This second unique component of human social cognition requires
an individual to represent triadic
relations 'You, and Me, collaboratively looking at, working on or talking about
This'
Saxe is discussing these theories in terms of the physical presence of an intentional actor.
Foundational stages are the first steps when reasoning about
others' actions.
1. Detecting the
presence of an intentional actor
(Extrastriate body area (EBA)). A region in
bilateral occipito-temporal cortex that shows
a selective response to human bodies and body parts, relative to other familiar
objects. Right specialised for perceiving others). Verbal
stories about the human body do not suffice.
2. Interpreting
the motions of a human body in terms of the person's goals
Posterior Superior temporal sulcus
(pSTS), usually right lateralised, recruited both during direct
observation and indirect observation of the results of the action. I.e. it represents the relationship
between a movement and its context.
For simple goal directed actions, the response in r. pSTS is increased
when there is a mismatch between the action and the target an an action
Representing the specific (representational) contents of mental
states such as beliefs
Temporo-parietal junction , adjacent
to but distinct from the pSTS
EP236 ' the BOLD response in this
region is high when subjects read stories that describe a character's true or
false beliefs but low during stories containing other information about
a character, including appearance, cultural background, or even internal,
subjective sensations .....that have no representational content'
this region is also
recruited 'for determining how the spatial
relations between two objects would appear from a character's point of view
versus from the subjects's own position'
3. Reasoning (the sophisticated end of social
cognition) about mental states
Recent imaging work has reconstructed the knowledge base on this
ie MPFC not the unique neural substrate of
reasoning about mental states
p 236 ' No part of the MPFC is specifically recruited for
reasoning about representational mental states' ( ie beliefs) 'instead
subregions are implicated in distinct components of social cognition' Two areas involved ventral and dorsal,
distinctiveness supported by double dissociations (neuropsychological evidence)
Ventral MPFC affective
empathy and sympathy (supported by evidence collected using a variety of
method)
Saxe p 237
definition of emotional empathy
based on Blair 'the cognitive and neural processes that produce a
congruent emotion in the observer in response to others' directly perceived
emotional displays or to descriptions of others'
emotion-laden experiences'
Dorsal MPFC implicated in ' shared or
collaborative attention and goals, that is triadic relations between Me, You
and This
