RamseyWard_social_priority_mapping

Abstract

Whether on a first-date or during a team briefing at work, our daily lives are inundated with social information and in recent years research has begun studying the neural mechanisms that support social information processing. We argue that the focus of social neuroscience research to date has been skewed towards specialised processes at the expense of general processing mechanisms with a consequence that unrealistic expectations have been set for what specialised processes alone can achieve. We propose that for social neuroscience to develop into a more mature research programme, it needs to embrace hybrid models that integrate specialised person representations with domain-general solutions, such as prioritisation and selection, which operate across all classes of information (both social and non-social). To illustrate our central arguments, we first describe then evaluate a hybrid model of information processing during social interactions that: 1) generates novel and falsifiable predictions compared to existing models; 2) is predicated on a wealth of neurobiological evidence spanning many decades, methods and species; 3) requires a superior standard of evidence to substantiate domain-specific mechanisms of social behaviour, and; 4) transforms expectations of what types of neural mechanisms may contribute to social information processing in both typical and atypical populations.