Mechanisms of Social Cognition

Abstract

Social animals including humans share a range of social mechanisms that are automatic and implicit and enable learning by observation. Learning from others includes imitation of actions and mirroring of emotions. Learning about others, such as their group membership and reputation, is crucial for social interactions that depend on trust. For accurate prediction of others' changeable dispositions, mentalizing is required, i.e., tracking of intentions, desires, and beliefs. Implicit mentalizing is present in infants less than one year old as well as in some nonhuman species. Explicit mentalizing is a meta-cognitive process and enhances the ability to learn about the world through self-monitoring and reflection, and may be uniquely human. Meta-cognitive processes can also exert control over automatic behavior, for instance, when short-term gains oppose long-term aims or when selfish and prosocial interests collide. We suggest that they also underlie the ability to explicitly share experiences with other agents, as in reflective discussion and teaching. These are key in increasing the accuracy of the models of the world that we construct.

Approximating Implicit and Explicit Mentalizing with Two Naturalistic Video-Based Tasks in Typical Development and Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…This is in line with the observation that individuals with ASD are characterized by severe impairments in real life social settings (Volkmar et al 2004), where mentalizing most often occurs implicitly (Frith and Frith 2012). However, the interrelationships between implicit and explicit mentalizing processes in typical and atypical development remain unclear.…”

“…Our findings seem to indicate that individuals with ASD have comparable impairments in implicit and explicit mentalizing and that therefore both processes deserve attention in therapeutic and intervention settings, such as social competence trainings (Frith and Frith 2012). To date, existing social competence trainings are mainly direct, training individuals to label emotional facial expression or emotional prosody (e.g., .…”

“…Up to now, however, it is largely unclear how implicit and explicit mentalizing processes can be distinguished and how they interact because previous studies either focused on only one of these processes or did not use comparable methodological formats that would allow unbiased comparisons (Frith and Frith 2012;Nosek et al 2011). Furthermore, the abovementioned indirect mentalizing tasks only assess implicit processes in terms of how participants respond to other minds and ignore how well they understand those minds.…”

Seeing the world through others’ minds: Inferring social context from behaviour

“…Past research tells us that individuals can infer information about a target's emotional state and intentions from their facial expressions (Frith & Frith, 2012), a process known as mentalising.…”

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AbstractPast research tells us that individuals can infer information about a target's emotional state and intentions from their facial expressions (Frith & Frith, 2012), a process known as mentalising.This extends to inferring the events that caused the facial reaction (e.g. Pillai, Sheppard, & Mitchell, 2012;Pillai et al, 2014), an ability known as retrodictive mindreading.

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