Modeling the Predictive Social Mind

Seeing Some One

This paper outlines a light approach to heavy issues of consciousness. The basic claim is that human minds are very much tailored to the requirements of action perception, that is, to what people see when they watch other people acting. I argue that the third-person perspective entailed in action perception offers an easy and more direct access to such enigmatic things as selfhood, intentionality, and agency than the first-person perspective does. In a sense, we get these things for free when we study action perception. I do not claim that the study of action perception can solve (or even dissolve) the enigmata entailed in consciousness. I do claim, however, that it sheds new light on relationships between one’s own mind and other minds.

Decoding the neural representation of self and person knowledge with multivariate pattern analysis and data-driven approaches

Multivariate pattern analysis and data-driven approaches to understand how the human brain encodes sensory information and higher level conceptual knowledge have become increasingly dominant in visual and cognitive neuroscience; however, it is only in recent years that these methods have been applied to the domain of social information processing. This review examines recent research in the field of social cognitive neuroscience focusing on how multivariate pattern analysis (e.g., pattern classification, representational similarity analysis) and data-driven methods (e.g., reverse correlation, intersubject correlation) have been used to decode and characterize high-level information about the self, other persons, and social groups. We begin with a review of what is known about how self-referential processing and person perception are represented in the medial prefrontal cortex based on conventional activation-based neuroimaging approaches. This is followed by a nontechnical overview of current multivariate pattern-based and data-driven neuroimaging methods designed to characterize and/or decode neural representations. The remainder of the review focuses on examining how these methods have been applied to the topic of self, person perception, and the perception of social groups. In this review, we highlight recent trends (e.g., analysis of social networks, decoding race and social groups, and the use of naturalistic stimuli) and discuss several theoretical challenges that arise from the application of these new methods to the question of how the brain represents knowledge about the self and others. This article is categorized under: Neuroscience > Cognition.

The conceptual structure of face impressions

Humans seamlessly infer the expanse of personality traits from others' facial appearance. These facial impressions are highly intercorrelated within a structure known as "face trait space." Research has extensively documented the facial features that underlie face impressions, thus outlining a bottom-up fixed architecture of face impressions, which cannot account for important ways impressions vary across perceivers. Classic theory in impression formation emphasized that perceivers use their lay conceptual beliefs about how personality traits correlate to form initial trait impressions, for instance, where trustworthiness of a target may inform impressions of their intelligence to the extent one believes the two traits are related. This considered, we explore the possibility that this lay "conceptual trait space"-how perceivers believe personality traits correlate in others-plays a role in face impressions, tethering face impressions to one another, thus shaping face trait space. In study 1, we found that conceptual and face trait space explain considerable variance in each other. In study 2, we found that participants with stronger conceptual associations between two traits judged those traits more similarly in faces. Importantly, using a face image classification task, we found in study 3 that participants with stronger conceptual associations between two traits used more similar facial features to make those two face trait impressions. Together, these findings suggest lay beliefs of how personality traits correlate may underlie trait impressions, and thus face trait space. This implies face impressions are not only derived bottom up from facial features, but also shaped by our conceptual beliefs.

Placebo Effect: Theory, Mechanisms and Teleological Roots

Why pain can be relieved with placebos is heavily debated. The term "placebo effect," implies that the placebo treatment induces pain relief which is imprecise because it is the mental cueing to the context of treatment and not the placebo itself that can reduce pain. This essay reverts to fundamentals of perception that have been used to explain how context generates predictions that can in turn effect the process of processing, organizing and interpreting of sensory inputs received from the periphery. We reinterpret placebo effect as a neurobiological phenomenon that occurs through the process of reward and aversive learning. The brain uses learnt information to generate predictions. The perceptual processes adjust the experience of pain to fit with the predictions generated from prior information. Placebo effect is thus understandably a result of the expectations and mental states that result from engaging in the process of treatment. These processes have teleological roots in ancient medicine and are the context that produces these responses is transforming with the evolution of modern medicine. Thus, when placebo effect is observed, the potent agent that induces pain reduction is not the placebo itself, but the mental cueing to the context of taking treatment.