Neurobiological elements of social cognition

old_uid13618
titleNeurobiological elements of social cognition
start_date2014/03/17
schedule11h
onlineno
location_infoNeuroSpin Amphi
summaryComplex social interaction is a defining feature of the human species   According to the increasingly popular social brain hypothesis, the human primate brain has evolved largely driven by constantly varying social selection pressures, rather than challenges of the constant physical environment. Instead of hypothesis-led experimental studies, we conducted a number of data-led investigations using coordinate-based meta-analysis (activation likelihood estimation), coactivation-based parcellation of seed regions, as well as database-enabled functional decoding. This allowed for a characterization of the neural systems subserving social information processing from a cognitive-domain-overarching rather than cognitive-domain-focused perspective. First, the results indicate social cognition as a mosaic, and not monolithic, neurobiological process, that is hardly separable from "non-social" neural systems. Second, classical psychological categories relate to frequently overlapping, and not discrete, neural systems. Third, high-level (such as Theory of Mind and moral thinking) and low-level (such as face recognition and evaluation) social cognition is inextricably linked, and not easily separable, on the neural level. These findings advocate increased effort towards tightly integrating knowledge on the neural instantiation of social phenomena from hypothesis-driven and data-driven methodological approaches.
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