The social brain: allowing humans to boldly go where no other species has been

The biological basis of complex human social interaction and communication has been illuminated through a coming together of various methods and disciplines. Among these are comparative studies of other species, studies of disorders of social cognition and developmental psychology. The use of neuroimaging and computational models has given weight to speculations about the evolution of social behaviour and culture in human societies. We highlight some networks of the social brain relevant to two-person interactions and consider the social signals between interacting partners that activate these networks.Wemake a case for distinguishing between signals that automatically trigger interaction and cooperation and ostensive signals that are used deliberately.We suggest that this ostensive signalling is needed for ‘closing the loop’ in two-person interactions, where the partners each know that they have the intention to communicate. The use of deliberate social signals can serve to increase reputation and trust and facilitates teaching. This is likely to be a critical factor in the steep cultural ascent ofmankind

Autism and Dyslexia: A Glance Over 25 Years of Research

Autism and dyslexia are wrongly classified as childhood disorders: They are lifelong and therefore have to be studied in adults as well as in children. Individual variability is enormous, and, as a result, behavioral diagnosis remains problematic. The study of the underlying cognitive abilities in autism and dyslexia has acted as a gateway for the emergence of developmental cognitive neuroscience

Fast Lane to Slow Science

Fast Science is bad for scientists and bad for science. Slow Science may actually help us to make faster progress, but how can we slow down? Here, I offer preliminary suggestions for how we can transition to a healthier and more sustainable research culture

Flux of life

Developmental cognitive neuroscience is flourishing but there are new challenges and new questions to be asked. I argue that we need a bigger picture and an evolutionary framework. This brings some challenges, such as the need to rewrite the old story of nature and nurture, and the need to systematically investigate innate predispositions. While brain imaging has provided some splendid insights and new puzzles to solve, its limitations must not be ignored. Can they help us to find out more about the extent to which the infant brain already configures the adult brain? Can we find out why neurodevelopmental disorders often have severe consequences on cognition and behaviour, despite the mitigating force of brain plasticity? I wish to encourage researchers of the future to take risks by letting their imagination inspire theories to pursue hard questions. I end with a wish list of topics, from start-up kits to abstract reasoning, that I hope can be tackled afresh. However, collecting physiological and behavioural data is not enough. We need a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of cognitive development

Mirroring and beyond: coupled dynamics as a generalized framework for modelling social interactions

When people observe one another, behavioural alignment can be detected at many levels, from the physical to the mental. Likewise, when people process the same highly complex stimulus sequences, such as films and stories, alignment is detected in the elicited brain activity. In early sensory areas, shared neural patterns are coupled to the low-level properties of the stimulus (shape, motion, volume, etc.), while in high-order brain areas, shared neural patterns are coupled to high-levels aspects of the stimulus, such as meaning. Successful social interactions require such alignments (both behavioural and neural), as communication cannot occur without shared understanding. However, we need to go beyond simple, symmetric (mirror) alignment once we start interacting. Interactions are dynamic processes, which involve continuous mutual adaptation, development of complementary behaviour and division of labour such as leader-follower roles. Here, we argue that interacting individuals are dynamically coupled rather than simply aligned. This broader framework for understanding interactions can encompass both processes by which behaviour and brain activity mirror each other (neural alignment), and situations in which behaviour and brain activity in one participant are coupled (but not mirrored) to the dynamics in the other participant. To apply these more sophisticated accounts of social interactions to the study of the underlying neural processes we need to develop new experimental paradigms and novel methods of data analysis

Forty years on: Uta Frith's contribution to research on autism and dyslexia, 1966–2006

Uta Frith has made a major contribution to our understanding of developmental disorders, especially autism and dyslexia. She has studied the cognitive and neurobiological bases of both disorders and demonstrated distinctive impairments in social cognition and central coherence in autism, and in phonological processing in dyslexia. In this enterprise she has encouraged psychologists to work in a theoretical framework that distinguishes between observed behaviour and the underlying cognitive and neurobiological processes that mediate that behaviour

Mindblind eyes: an absence of spontaneous theory of mind in Asperger syndrome

Adults with Asperger syndrome can understand mental states such as desires and beliefs (mentalizing) when explicitly prompted to do so, despite having impairments in social communication. We directly tested the hypothesis that such individuals nevertheless fail to mentalize spontaneously. To this end, we used an eye-tracking task that has revealed the spontaneous ability to mentalize in typically developing infants. We showed that, like infants, neurotypical adults’ (n = 17 participants) eye movements anticipated an actor’s behavior on the basis of her false belief. This was not the case for individuals with Asperger syndrome (n = 19). Thus, these individuals do not attribute mental states spontaneously, but they may be able to do so in explicit tasks through compensatory learning

Making a difference: Why study autism

I first met autistic children as a trainee clinical psychologist, and I was captivated for life. I thought them hauntingly mysterious. How could they do jigsaw puzzles straight off, and yet never even respond to my simple requests to play with them? What was going on? How could they be tested? Here was a challenge that cried out for basic research

Knowing me, knowing you: Spontaneous use of mentalistic language for self and other in autism

Recent studies on mentalizing have shown that autistic individuals who pass explicit mentalizing tasks may still have difficulties with implicit mentalizing tasks. This study explores implicit mentalizing by examining spontaneous speech that is likely to contain mentalistic expressions. The spontaneous production of meta-statements provides a clear measure for implicit mentalizing that is unlikely to be learned through experience. We examined the self- and other-descriptions of highly verbally able autistic and non-autistic adults in terms of their spontaneous use of mentalistic language and meta-representational utterances through quantitative and qualitative analysis. We devised a hierarchical coding system that allowed us to study the types of statements produced in comparable conditions for the self and for a familiar other. The descriptions of autistic participants revealed less mentalistic content relating to psychological traits and meta-statements. References to physical traits were similar between groups. Within each group, participants produced a similar pattern of types of mental utterance across ‘self’ and ‘other’ conditions. This suggests that autistic individuals show a unique pattern of mental-state-representation for both self and other. Meta-statements add a degree of complexity to self- and other-descriptions and to the understanding of mental states; their reduction in autism provides evidence for implicit mentalizing difficulties