The mystery of the brain-culture interface

Nature and culture work together to shape who we are. We are embedded in culture and are profoundly influenced by what those around us say and do. The interface between minds occurs at the level of explicit metacognition, which is at the top of our brain's control hierarchy. But how do our brains do this

The role of social cognition in decision making

Successful decision making in a social setting depends on our ability to understand the intentions, emotions and beliefs of others. The mirror system allows us to understand other people's motor actions and action intentions. ‘Empathy’ allows us to understand and share emotions and sensations with others. ‘Theory of mind’ allows us to understand more abstract concepts such as beliefs or wishes in others. In all these cases, evidence has accumulated that we use the specific neural networks engaged in processing mental states in ourselves to understand the same mental states in others. However, the magnitude of the brain activity in these shared networks is modulated by contextual appraisal of the situation or the other person. An important feature of decision making in a social setting concerns the interaction of reason and emotion. We consider four domains where such interactions occur: our sense of fairness, altruistic punishment, trust and framing effects. In these cases, social motivations and emotions compete with each other, while higher-level control processes modulate the interactions of these low-level biases

Do calendrical savants use calculation to answer date questions? : a functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Calendrical savants can name the weekdays for dates from different years with remarkable speed and accuracy. Whether calculation rather than just memory is involved is disputed. Grounds for doubting whether they can calculate are reviewed and criteria for attributing date calculation skills to them are discussed. At least some calendrical savants possess date calculation skills. A behavioural characteristic observed in many calendrical savants is increased response time for questions about more remote years. This may be because more remote years require more calculation or because closer years are more practised. An experiment is reported that used functional magnetic resonance imaging to attempt to discriminate between these explanations. Only two savants could be scanned and excessive head movement corrupted one savant's mental arithmetic data. Nevertheless, there was increased parietal activation during both mental arithmetic and date questions and this region showed increased activity with more remote dates. These results suggest that the calendrical skills observed in savants result from intensive practice with calculations used in solving mental arithmetic problems. The mystery is not how they solve these problems, but why

Social cognition

Social cognition concerns the various psychological processes that enable individuals to take advantage of being part of a social group. Of major importance to social cognition are the various social signals that enable us to learn about the world. Such signals include facial expressions, such as fear and disgust, which warn us of danger, and eye gaze direction, which indicate where interesting things can be found. Such signals are particularly important in infant development. Social referencing, for example, refers to the phenomenon in which infants refer to their mothers' facial expressions to determine whether or not to approach a novel object. We can learn a great deal simply by observing others. Much of this signalling seems to happen automatically and unconsciously on the part of both the sender and the receiver. We can learn to fear a stimulus by observing the response of another, in the absence of awareness of that stimulus. By contrast, learning by instruction, rather than observation, does seem to depend upon awareness of the stimulus, since such learning does not generalize to situations where the stimulus is presented subliminally. Learning by instruction depends upon a meta-cognitive process through which both the sender and the receiver recognize that signals are intended to be signals. An example would be the ‘ostensive’ signals that indicate that what follows are intentional communications. Infants learn more from signals that they recognize to be instructive. I speculate that it is this ability to recognize and learn from instructions rather than mere observation which permitted that advanced ability to benefit from cultural learning that seems to be unique to the human race

Learning Rapidly about the Relevance of Visual Cues Requires Conscious Awareness

Humans have been shown capable of performing many cognitive tasks using information of which they are not consciously aware. This raises questions about what role consciousness actually plays in cognition. Here, we explored whether participants can learn cue-target contingencies in an attentional learning task when the cues were presented below the level of conscious awareness, and how this differs from learning about conscious cues. Participants’ manual (Experiment 1) and saccadic (Experiment 2) response speeds were influenced by both conscious and unconscious cues. However, participants were only able to adapt to reversals of the cue-target contingencies (Experiment 1) or changes in the reliability of the cues (Experiment 2) when consciously aware of the cues. Therefore, although visual cues can be processed unconsciously, learning about cues over a few trials requires conscious awareness of them. Finally, we discuss implications for cognitive theories of consciousness

The social brain?

The notion that there is a 'social brain' in humans specialized for social interactions has received considerable support from brain imaging and, to a lesser extent, from lesion studies. Specific roles for the various components of the social brain are beginning to emerge. For example, the amygdala attaches emotional value to faces, enabling us to recognize expressions such as fear and trustworthiness, while the posterior superior temporal sulcus predicts the end point of the complex trajectories created when agents act upon the world. It has proved more difficult to assign a role to medial prefrontal cortex, which is consistently activated when people think about mental states. I suggest that this region may have a special role in the second-order representations needed for communicative acts when we have to represent someone else's representation of our own mental state. These cognitive processes are not specifically social, since they can be applied in other domains. However, these cognitive processes have been driven to ever higher levels of sophistication by the complexities of social interaction

Helping the waiter to hold his tray: Rigid haptic linkage promotes inter-personal motor coordination

When a glass is lifted from a tray, there is a challenge for the waiter. He must quickly compensate for the reduction in the weight of the tray to keep it balanced. This compensation is easily achieved if the waiter lifts the glass himself. Because he has, himself, initiated the action, he can predict the timing and the magnitude of the perturbation of the tray and respond (via the holding hand) accordingly. In this study, we examined coordination when either one or two people hold the tray while either one of them or a third person removes the glass. Our results show that there is exquisite coordination between the two people holding the tray. We suggest that this coordination depends upon the haptic link provided by the rigid platform that both people are holding. We conclude that the guest at a reception should not lift his drink from the waiter’s tray until they have the waiter’s attention but, if too thirsty to wait, should lend a hand holding the tray

The Global Workspace Needs Metacognition

The two leading cognitive accounts of consciousness currently available con-cern global workspace (a form of working memory) and metacognition. There isrelatively little interaction between these two approaches and it has even beensuggested that the two accounts are rival and separable alternatives. Here, weargue that the successful function of a global workspace critically requires thatthe broadcast representations include a metacognitive component