Invisible Mind

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lasana T. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social Rules ◽  
Athletic Competition ◽  
Fitness Advantage

Why do people engage in pro and anti-social behaviour? Invisible Mind takes an interdisciplinary approach to address this question, among others, by focussing on the spontaneous psychological ability social cognition, and its inherent flexibility. People get inside the minds—infer the mental states—of others, including non-human agents and animals. Such social cognition is necessary for recognising another as a full human being, deserving of being included in the boundaries of moral protection, encouraging obedience to moral and social rules during social interactions. People can also withhold social cognition from other people, resulting a dehumanized perception, or extend it to non-human agents, resulting anthropomorphism. Harris argues that this flexibility is functional; social cognition evolved when people lived in much smaller groups, suggesting flexibility provided a fitness advantage specific to such a social environment, but may be occasionally maladaptive in modern societies. He reviews social, cognitive, evolutionary, and developmental psychology that supports this claim, before considering the implications of flexible social cognition for economics, legal theories, practice, and policy, international disputes, and athletic competition. He then explores what might be the consequences of flexible social cognition in modern societies where technology facilitates social communication and interaction.

Supporting Social Interactions In Human-Ai Teams: Profiling Human Teammates From Sparse Data

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 665-669
Author(s):  
Rhyse Bendell ◽  
Jessica Williams ◽  
Stephen M. Fiore ◽  
Florian Jentsch
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Team Performance ◽  
Intelligent Agents ◽  
Social Intelligence ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Human Agent

Artificial intelligence has been developed to perform all manner of tasks but has not gained capabilities to support social cognition. We suggest that teams comprised of both humans and artificially intelligent agents cannot achieve optimal team performance unless all teammates have the capacity to employ social-cognitive mechanisms. These form the foundation for generating inferences about their counterparts and enable execution of informed, appropriate behaviors. Social intelligence and its utilization are known to be vital components of human-human teaming processes due to their importance in guiding the recognition, interpretation, and use of the signals that humans naturally use to shape their exchanges. Although modern sensors and algorithms could allow AI to observe most social cues, signals, and other indicators, the approximation of human-to-human social interaction -based upon aggregation and modeling of such cues is currently beyond the capacity of potential AI teammates. Partially, this is because humans are notoriously variable. We describe an approach for measuring social-cognitive features to produce the raw information needed to create human agent profiles that can be operated upon by artificial intelligences.

scholarly journals Neural correlates of theory-of-mind are associated with variation in children’s everyday social cognition

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 579-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cora E Mukerji ◽  
Sarah Hope Lincoln ◽  
David Dodell-Feder ◽  
Charles A Nelson ◽  
Christine I Hooker
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Mental States ◽  
False Belief ◽  
School Age Children ◽  
Cognitive Behavior ◽  
School Age ◽  
Temporoparietal Junction ◽  
False Belief Reasoning

ABSTRACT Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to reason about others’ mental states, is central to healthy social development. Neural mechanisms supporting ToM may contribute to individual differences in children’s social cognitive behavior. Employing a false belief functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm, we identified patterns of neural activity and connectivity elicited by ToM reasoning in school-age children (N = 32, ages 9–13). Next, we tested relations between these neural ToM correlates and children’s everyday social cognition. Several key nodes of the neural ToM network showed greater activity when reasoning about false beliefs (ToM condition) vs non-mentalistic false content (control condition), including the bilateral temporoparietal junction (RTPJ and LTPJ), precuneus (PC) and right superior temporal sulcus. In addition, children demonstrated task-modulated changes in connectivity among these regions to support ToM relative to the control condition. ToM-related activity in the PC was negatively associated with variation in multiple aspects of children’s social cognitive behavior. Together, these findings elucidate how nodes of the ToM network act and interact to support false belief reasoning in school-age children and suggest that neural ToM mechanisms are linked to variation in everyday social cognition.

scholarly journals Adolescent Social Cognitive Development

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Guazzelli Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Developmental Trajectories ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Cultural Considerations ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
Social Cognitive Processes

During adolescence, our bodies, brains, and behaviors undergo marked developmental changes. Adolescents often become increasingly aware of their social worlds and use this stage of development to develop skills to help them navigate this changing landscape. Up until recently, an overwhelming majority of research on social cognition–specifically on understanding the mental states of others–has focused on childhood. In this chapter, I demonstrate that adolescence is an important developmental period for the refinement and sophistication of social cognitive processes that began developing during childhood. I also discuss the development of more advanced and distinct social cognitive processes. Additionally, I review the available literature on the developmental trajectories of advanced social cognition across adolescence–including individual differences, cultural considerations, and implications for adolescent health and wellbeing. Finally, I describe how future research may begin to address current knowledge gaps on this topic.

scholarly journals Gender as Embedded Social Cognition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Diekman ◽  
Toni Schmader
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
The Self ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Categories ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Gendered Expectations

We examine gender as a cultural construct enacted through social cognitive processes that are embedded within the self, social interactions, and societal institutions. The embeddedness perspective elaborates how the binary gender categorization can create quite real gendered outcomes and experiences even if gender differences are not biologically essential. These categories take on a reality outside of the mind of perceivers because the meanings attached to gender categories are shared by others in the culture, enacted in social interactions, internalized into self-views, and maintained by social systems. Societal institutions explicitly and implicitly organize around gender, producing gendered norms, roles, and expectations. These norms, roles, and expectations shape the nature of interpersonal interactions both within and across gender lines and an individual’s self-selected experiences. Critically, these social interactions and personal choices in turn create behavioral and cognitive confirmation of the gendered expectations of others. Gendered expectations and experiences become internalized into the self, including one’s own self-concept and gender identity. We close by examining implications of this perspective for gender differences and similarities in social cognition, as well as malleability and stability in gender cognitions and outcomes.

Of Mental States and Machine Learning

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 1362-1366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Best ◽  
Samantha F. Warta ◽  
Katelynn A. Kapalo ◽  
Stephen M. Fiore
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
Robot Interaction ◽  
Machine Learning Classifiers

Using research in social cognition as a foundation, we studied rapid versus reflective mental state attributions and the degree to which machine learning classifiers can be trained to make such judgments. We observed differences in response times between conditions, but did not find significant differences in the accuracy of mental state attributions. We additionally demonstrate how to train machine classifiers to identify mental states. We discuss advantages of using an interdisciplinary approach to understand and improve human-robot interaction and to further the development of social cognition in artificial intelligence.

Interoception and social cognition in chronic low back pain: a common inference disturbance? An exploratory study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florent El Grabli ◽  
François Quesque ◽  
Céline Borg ◽  
Michael Witthöft ◽  
George A Michael ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Low Back Pain ◽  
Back Pain ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
Chronic Low Back Pain ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Heart Beat ◽  
Low Back ◽  
Interoceptive Accuracy

Aim: Lower interoceptive abilities are a characteristic of chronic pain conditions. Social support plays an important role in chronic low back pain (cLBP) but social cognitive skills have rarely been investigated. This study aimed to characterize interoceptive and social cognitive abilities in cLBP and to study the relationship between both domains that have been brought closer together by brain predictive coding models. Materials & methods: Twenty-eight patients with cLBP and 74 matched controls were included. Interoceptive accuracy (Heart Beat Perception Task), sensibility/awareness (Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness) and mental-states inference abilities (Mini-Social Cognition and Emotional Assessment) were assessed. Results: cLBP Patients had lower interoceptive accuracy and mentalizing performance. Conclusion: Less efficient interoceptive accuracy and mentalizing abilities were found in cLBP patients without correlation between these performances.

scholarly journals Common Brain Regions with Distinct Patterns of Neural Responses during Mentalizing about Groups and Individuals

2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (9) ◽  
pp. 1406-1417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Manuel Contreras ◽  
Jessica Schirmer ◽  
Mahzarin R. Banaji ◽  
Jason P. Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Physical Attributes ◽  
Medial Pfc ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

An individual has a mind; a group does not. Yet humans routinely endow groups with mental states irreducible to any of their members (e.g., “scientists hope to understand every aspect of nature”). But are these mental states categorically similar to those we attribute to individuals? In two fMRI experiments, we tested this question against a set of brain regions that are consistently associated with social cognition—medial pFC, anterior temporal lobe, TPJ, and medial parietal cortex. Participants alternately answered questions about the mental states and physical attributes of individual people and groups. Regions previously associated with mentalizing about individuals were also robustly responsive to judgments of groups, suggesting that perceivers deploy the same social-cognitive processes when thinking about the mind of an individual and the “mind” of a group. However, multivariate searchlight analysis revealed that several of these regions showed distinct multivoxel patterns of response to groups and individual people, suggesting that perceivers maintain distinct representations of groups and individuals during mental state inferences. These findings suggest that perceivers mentalize about groups in a manner qualitatively similar to mentalizing about individual people, but that the brain nevertheless maintains important distinctions between the representations of such entities.

scholarly journals Growing Up Thinking of God’s Beliefs: Theory of Mind and Ontological Knowledge

SAGE Open ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 215824401880987 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cinzia Di Dio ◽  
Sara Isernia ◽  
Chiara Ceolaro ◽  
Antonella Marchetti ◽  
Davide Massaro
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Mental States ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Belief Attribution ◽  
Knowledge Bias

The study of social cognition involves the attribution of states of mind to humans, as well as, quite recently, to nonhuman creatures, like God. Some studies support the role of social cognition in religious beliefs, whereas others ascribe religious beliefs to an ontological knowledge bias. The present study compares these distinct approaches in 37 catholic children aged 4 to 10 years, who were administered an adapted version of the unexpected content task assessing false beliefs of different agents: a human, a dog, a robot, and God. The children were also administered an intentionality understanding task, a component of mentalization abilities, and an interview on ontological knowledge assessing emotions, intentions, imagination, and epistemic knowledge. In line with previous research, the results showed that children did not attribute false beliefs to God as they did to the human and to other nonhuman agents. Importantly, while false-belief attribution to the human was associated with the children’s ability to attribute mental states (intentionality understanding), false-belief attribution to God was related to children’s ontological knowledge. We conclude that, contrary to false-belief attribution to the human and to other nonhuman agents, children’s understanding of God’s mind is largely a function of ontological knowledge about God, rather than of children’s social cognitive functions.

Affective and Cognitive Verbal Theory of Mind in Schizophrenia: Results From a Novel Paradigm

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Łukasz Okruszek ◽  
Aleksandra Piejka ◽  
Ewa Szczepocka ◽  
Adam Wysokiński ◽  
Agnieszka Pluta
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Interaction Effect ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Cognitive Assessment ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Assessment Tool ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Brief Cognitive Assessment ◽  
Verbal Theory

AbstractObjectives: Impairments of Theory of Mind (ToM) have been repeatedly demonstrated in patients with schizophrenia (SCZ). However, only a handful of studies have explored deficits in affective and cognitive subcomponents of ToM. Thus, this study aims to examine affective and cognitive ToM abilities in SCZ by using a novel, verbal paradigm. Methods: Twenty-four SCZ and 22 healthy comparison subjects (HC) completed a battery of tasks, which consisted of: (i) Brief Cognitive Assessment Tool for Schizophrenia (B-CATS), (ii) three well-established tasks measuring social cognitive abilities, and (iii) original tasks which assess ability to infer cognitive and affective mental states based on everyday verbal social interactions. Results: In line with previous findings, SCZ were outperformed by HC in all tasks. However, the interaction effect of the group and the task showed that cognitive (as opposed to affective) ToM was more profoundly impaired in patients with SCZ. Conclusions: It is proposed that in SCZ group cognitive ToM is more impaired as it involves more effortful reflective processes, while affective ToM, which is more automatic and based on reflexive processes, may differentiate patients from healthy comparison subjects to a lesser extent. (JINS, 2018, 24, 305–309)

scholarly journals Developmental phenomenology: examples from social cognition

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Vincini ◽  
Shaun Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Phenomenological Psychology ◽  
Developmental Science ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Psychological Models ◽  
Innate Ability

Abstract We explore relationships between phenomenology and developmental psychology through an in-depth analysis of a particular problem in social cognition: the most fundamental access to other minds. In the first part of the paper, we examine how developmental science can benefit phenomenology. We explicate the connection between cognitive psychology and developmental phenomenology as a form of constructive phenomenological psychology. Nativism in contemporary science constitutes a strong impulse to conceive of the possibility of an innate ability to perceive others’ mental states, an idea which also has a transcendental implication. In the second part, we consider how phenomenology can contribute to developmental science. Phenomenology can go beyond the necessary evaluation and reinterpretation of experimental results. Some phenomenological notions and theories can be put forward on a par with alternative cognitive-psychological models and compete with them on grounds of empirical adequacy. For example, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of pairing can constitute a viable account of how infants access other minds. We outline a number of ways in which this account can be tested and can thus contribute to generating empirical knowledge.

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