1. Foresight Cognitive Systems Project Social Cognition
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
University College London
Foresight Cognitive Systems Project Social Cognition
Depriving people of social interaction is v. punishing
Uta Frith
and
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

2. Interdisciplinary interest
Social
psychology
Developmental
psychology
Comparative
psychology
Social Cognition
Cognitive
neuroscience
Computer science and
artificial intelligence

3. Social Cognition: a new domain of Cognitive Neuroscience
Social Cognition: Any cognitive process that involves other people
Focus on computational and neural mechanisms
>3 Social Cognition special issues in Neuroscience journals in the past year
Danger of too broad a definition
Long tradition of study of social interaction: Animal and Human
We narrow down:
Processes which imply an effect of one person on another
We emphasise cognition:
Mechanisms that can be implemented computationally and at the neural level.
We emphasise specificity:
All cognitive processes (language, memory)are involved in social cognition.
But, some processes specifically sustain the effect of one person on another.
The brain distinguishes intentional and mechanical events,
Animate and inanimate objects,
Agents and non-agents
Faces and objects

4. Mechanisms of Social Cognition
This is a list of mechanisms that have a claim to being considered.
They are amenable to being understood in computational and neural models.
These mechanisms are currently topics of cognitive neuroscience.
As well as topics of artificial systems.They appear very early in life
From birth human infants prefer faces. The brain specialises in face recognition: FFA
Basic motional expressions are recognised even without awareness. Amygdala. I

5. Recognising emotional expressions
Recognising faces
Recognising emotional expressions
This is a list of mechanisms that have a claim to being considered.
They are amenable to being understood in computational and neural models.
These mechanisms are currently topics of cognitive neuroscience.
As well as topics of artificial systems.They appear very early in life
From birth human infants prefer faces. The brain specialises in face recognition: FFA
Basic motional expressions are recognised even without awareness. Amygdala. I

6. Detecting eye gaze
Infants show eye gaze reflex. They look where another person is looking. STS

7. Perceiving biological motion
Infants detect biological motion -3 m. Movie: bringing heap of dots to life. STS

8. Imitation
These mechanisms appear in the second year of life in humans. From about 18 months
Meltzoff showed that newborns have a primitive form of imitation of certain mouth movements. Robots can learn to imitate.
True flexible (not slavish) imitation later.

9. Theory of Mind
ToM - the intuitive ability to attribute mental states, desired, beliefs to others.
Burgeoning research since 1978
Cartoon 1: funny if you appreciate the fact that the angler at the bottom does not know
that the angler at the top is fishing his baits, And the fact that both want to get fish.
Cartoon 2: funny without attributing knowledge or desire to angler
The line was in the same position so long that a spider built a web.

10. Complex Emotions and processes:
Deception
Trustworthiness
Embarrassment
Empathy
Morality
Complex emotions: guilt, shame, trust, embarrassment, envy, jealousy - stuff of novels.
More than amygdala response, but also awareness of one feeling state
Empathy and morality: Mechanism may be related to an automatic response to distress.

11. When social communication fails
Antisocial behaviour
Conduct disorder
Autism
Schizophrenia
Psychopathy
These disorders are primarily disorders of social communication
Autism: ToM mechanisms failure has been shown.
Lack of intuitive ability to mentalise
Also in Schizophrenia: paranoid ideas suggest
Overactive mental state attribution
Poor sharing of mental states
Antisocial behaviour: confounding of biological and environmental factors.
Violence and aggression not the same as psychopathy.
Psychopathy: developmental disorder
Amygdala? Genetic basis likely
No autonomic response to distress cues
No recognition of morally wrong acts. No remorse.

12. Current and future interests
Life span development: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age
Genetics
Social IQ
Prejudice
Imitating role models
Fanaticism
Moral responsibility, free will
Although we crave social ineractions, we also suffer from them. We would like to know how to handle poor interactions, avoid damaging conflict.
Spin is reputation management. We all need it From adolescence we wake up to this
Responsibility. How to improve it?
We are usually unaware of prejudice.We need to be made aware. How?
Imitation of bad role models is a concern: Violence on TV - does it promote violence?
When are good role models imitated?
Social IQ: people differ in social competence. Can we measure this?
Brainwashing: Why are some people turned into fantics, fundamentalists?
Cultural evolution: Can we overcome primitive and outdated biological reflexes?
Moral Responsibility:
How can we understand genetics properly? It wasn’t me - it was my genes!

13. Social Robots? Is human social interaction special?
Artificial agent communication, learning and teaching
Facial and emotion recognition in machines
Cars that respond to emotion
Electronic aids for social interaction
Robot companions, toys
Not only young infants and adults. Also adolescents Also old age
Robots will play an increasing role as teachers, companions?
(Marvin - who is so depressed.)
This graceful example of a difficult motor task kindly provided by Daniel Wolpert shows that a difficult social task might also be mastered by robots
Could we pop a daily pill to improve our ability to show empathy, switch points of view?
Are there know out genes that make an animal antisocial or asocial?
Disorders of neuro-genetic origin can be remediated.
Now by compensatory learning.
In the future by cognitive engineering?