Social Cognition through the Lens of Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience

Abstract

Social cognition refers to a set of processes, ranging from perception to decision-making, underlying the ability to decode others' intentions and behaviors to plan actions fitting with social and moral, besides individual and economic considerations. Its centrality in everyday life reflects the neural complexity of social processing and the ubiquity of social cognitive deficits in different pathological conditions. Social cognitive processes can be clustered in three domains associated with (a) perceptual processing of social information such as faces and emotional expressions (social perception), (b) grasping others' cognitive or affective states (social understanding), and (c) planning behaviors taking into consideration others', in addition to one's own, goals (social decision-making). We review these domains from the lens of cognitive neuroscience, i.e., in terms of the brain areas mediating the role of such processes in the ability to make sense of others' behavior and plan socially appropriate actions. The increasing evidence on the “social brain” obtained from healthy young individuals nowadays constitutes the baseline for detecting changes in social cognitive skills associated with physiological aging or pathological conditions. In the latter case, impairments in one or more of the abovementioned domains represent a prominent concern, or even a core facet, of neurological (e.g., acquired brain injury or neurodegenerative diseases), psychiatric (e.g., schizophrenia), and developmental (e.g., autism) disorders. To pave the way for the other papers of this issue, addressing the social cognitive deficits associated with severe acquired brain injury, we will briefly discuss the available evidence on the status of social cognition in normal aging and its breakdown in neurodegenerative disorders. Although the assessment and treatment of such impairments is a relatively novel sector in neurorehabilitation, the evidence summarized here strongly suggests that the development of remediation procedures for social cognitive skills will represent a future field of translational research in clinical neuroscience.

Resting-State Functional Correlates of Social Cognition in Multiple Sclerosis: An Explorative Study

“…Social cognition is a broad construct that includes different cognitive processes related to social interaction (Beer and Ochsner, 2006). Several theoretical models have been proposed to describe the processes involved in social cognition and how these processes relate to each other; for example, according to Arioli et al (2018), social cognition includes three main domains: social perception (the ability to distinguish between objects and persons), social understanding (the ability to decode others' behaviours) and social decision making (the ability to make decisions on the basis of others' behaviours). As for the relationships between processes, there are models that distinguish between cognitive ToM, affective ToM and empathy (Shamay-Tsoory et al, 2010), but there are also evidences of overlapping constructs and topographical convergences across brain activities related to these processes (Bzdock et al, 2012).…”

“…The results suggest an INTRODUCTION Social cognition includes mental operations essential for functional social interactions (Beer and Ochsner, 2006). A key aspect of social cognition is social understanding (Arioli et al, 2018), the cognitive ability to decode and attribute mental states such as goals or intentions, knowledge, belief, thoughts and emotions to oneself and others (Premack and Woodruff, 1978).…”

Neural processing of social interaction: Coordinate‐based meta‐analytic evidence from human neuroimaging studies

“…Decoding others' intentions, to understand and predict their behavior, is a core component of social cognition. Despite increasing evidence on the neural bases of social understanding (Arioli, Crespi, & Canessa, ; Spunt & Lieberman, ), it is still debated how intentions, and particularly social intentions in interactive contexts, are neurally represented, and whether this process recruits dedicated brain structures (Frith, ). Most of the relevant evidence in this respect involves the mirror (Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Rizzolatti, ) and mentalizing (“theory of mind”; Frith & Frith, ) networks.…”

Social cognition: Patterns of impairments in mild and moderate Alzheimer's disease

“…involvement of dimensions of "higher level" perception, such as emotion recognizing and intentions. 3 Then, after the correct identification, social stimuli are enabled to understand the mental and intentional status of other people in a second domain, social understanding. It includes "mentalizing" or the ability to predict or explain the behavior of other people that is, the theory of mind (ToM) 3 and empathy, namely, thoughts and feelings that a person experiences concerning someone else's experience.…”

“…4 And based on domains of social perception and social understanding we have the third domain that involves the decision-making in the social context that is directly related to the awareness of decision and their consequences for both ourselves and others. 3 The literature on the effects of Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression on SC appears to be mixed. SC deficits are commonly related to the progression of the disease 5,6 or more precisely to the global cognition deterioration.…”