Illuminating the dark matter of social neuroscience: Considering the problem of social interaction from philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific perspectives

Abstract

Successful human social interaction depends on our capacity to understand other people's mental states and to anticipate how they will react to our actions. Despite its importance to the human condition, the exact mechanisms underlying our ability to understand another's actions, feelings, and thoughts are still a matter of conjecture. Here, we consider this problem from philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific perspectives. In a critical review, we demonstrate that attempts to draw parallels across these complementary disciplines is premature: The second-person perspective does not map directly to Interaction or Simulation theories, online social cognition, or shared neural network accounts underlying action observation or empathy. Nor does the third-person perspective map onto Theory-Theory (TT), offline social cognition, or the neural networks that support Theory of Mind (ToM). Moreover, we argue that important qualities of social interaction emerge through the reciprocal interplay of two independent agents whose unpredictable behavior requires that models of their partner's internal state be continually updated. This analysis draws attention to the need for paradigms in social neuroscience that allow two individuals to interact in a spontaneous and natural manner and to adapt their behavior and cognitions in a response contingent fashion due to the inherent unpredictability in another person's behavior. Even if such paradigms were implemented, it is possible that the specific neural correlates supporting such reciprocal interaction would not reflect computation unique to social interaction but rather the use of basic cognitive and emotional processes combined in a unique manner. Finally, we argue that given the crucial role of social interaction in human evolution, ontogeny, and every-day social life, a more theoretically and methodologically nuanced approach to the study of real social interaction will nevertheless help the field of social cognition to evolve.

Neural substrates underlying the tendency to accept anger-infused ultimatum offers during dynamic social interactions

“…Moreover, the vmPFC and dpI findings replicate previous findings, while we may speculate that the BS/LC finding is related to our ecologically valid anger-infused manipulation since it was not previously reported in the UG-context. We thus support recent conceptual developments in shifting neuroscientific endeavor, especially in the neuroscience of affect, from an "isolated" to a "socially interacting" brain mode (Przyrembel et al, 2012;Schilbach et al, 2013).…”

“…However, the interaction between players in the UG lacks fundamental characteristics of the naturalistic social dynamics of such an interaction. A true engagement in social interaction occurs when people can communicate with other people in their environment, conveying their feelings, thoughts and intended actions, and adapting themselves in a response-contingent manner (Przyrembel et al, 2012;Schilbach et al, 2013). Yet the vast majority of findings on the neurobiological underpinnings of complex human cognitiveaffective phenomena are based on "offline" paradigms during which participants' brains are studied in isolation from other agents in the environment.…”

Neurolinguistic and machine-learning perspectives on direct speech BCIs for restoration of naturalistic communication

“…Brain activity during spontaneous, non-experimental communication, however, is a largely unexplored phenomenon, which has been referred to as 'the dark matter' of cognitive neuroscience [40]. To bridge this gap, several labs worldwide have started investigating the neuronal activity underlying language in extraoperatively recorded ECoG in increasingly naturalistic experiments [3,4,[41][42][43][44] as well as in conditions of non-experimental, real-world communication [18,20,21,23,[45][46][47][48][49].…”

With love, from me to you: Embedding social interactions in affective neuroscience

“…In addition, there seems to be a subjective element corresponding to a fluctuating perception or sensation of connectedness, ranging from none at all to possibly reflecting a unique sense of "we", which supposedly enables the agents to better understand each other. A more operationalized definition specifies four criteria for "closing the loop" on social interactions: dynamic interplay, unlimited range of responses, uncontrolled partners and emergent qualities (Przyrembel et al, 2012). However, there is an important theoretical debate as to whether the "we-ness" of social interaction indeed reflects an emergent property of the interaction that enables the agents to access additional information about one another or whether it simply reflects a first-person perspective that captures the self's engagement in social interaction (Gallotti and Frith, 2013).…”