The molecules of social recognition memory: implications for social cognition, extended mind, and neuroethics

Social cognition, cognitive neuroscience, and neuroethics have reached a synthesis of late, but some troubling features are present. The neuroscience that currently dominates the study of social cognition is exclusively cognitive neuroscience, as contrasted with the cellular and increasingly molecular emphasis that has gripped mainstream neuroscience over the past three decades. Furthermore, the recent field of molecular and cellular cognition has begun to unravel some molecular mechanisms involved in social cognition, especially pertaining to the consolidation of memories of particular conspecific organisms. Some new experimental techniques for positive interventions into these hypothesized mechanisms offer opportunities for establishing direct causal linkages between intra-neuronal molecular events and the behaviors used to measure social cognitive phenomena. Predicted results from an experiment described below also cast doubt on the application of the “extended mind” approach from recent cognitive science to ground the neuroscience of social cognition. Since neuroethics relies heavily on our best neuroscience of social cognition, that field may soon need to extend its attention beyond cognitive neuroscience, and into neuroscience’s cellular and molecular mainstream.     

Language, meaning, and social cognition.

Social cognition is meant to examine the process of meaningful social interaction. Despite the central involvement of language in this process, language has not received the focal attention that it deserves. Conceptualizing meaningful social interaction as the process of construction and exchange of meaning, the authors argue that language can be productively construed as a semiotic tool, a tool for meaning making and exchange, and that language use can produce unintended consequences in its users. First, the article shows a particular instance of language use to be a collaborative process that influences the representation of meaning in the speaker, the listener, and the collective that includes both the speaker and listener. It then argues that language use and social cognition may have reciprocal effects in the long run and may have significant implications for generating and maintaining cultural differences in social cognition.     

Normative reconstruction and social memory: Honneth and Ricoeur

Normative reconstruction is a form of immanent critique which judges society in terms of values which are already institutionalized and implicitly expressed across everyday forms of interaction. Honneth, for his part, reads the value of social freedom into the normative grammar of modern institutions and anticipates further advances towards its institutionalization. Many have voiced doubts over the extent to which the model of normative reconstruction which Honneth proposes is solidly anchored in social reality: at worst, it is argued, this reality is resistant to reconstruction in terms of the value of social freedom; at best, it is too susceptible to multiple readings to allow for such a reconstruction. I seek to respond to these charges, while also testing the reach of Ricoeur’s understanding of the philosophical anthropological idea of indebtedness to the past, by following up on Honneth’s appeal to a horizon of social memory in response to his own uncertainties over the viability of normative reconstruction. More generally, I seek to arrive at a better understanding of the capacity of memory to orientate social critique within a shifting historical landscape.

     

Friends,friendlessness, and social cognition

I applaud the methods and findings of the target article by Fink and colleagues (Brit. J. Dev. Psychol, 2015; 33, 1–17) who demonstrate an important link between theory of mind and children's social lives. In particular, enhanced theory of mind in preschool buffers children from friendlessness in the transition to school. Going further, I suggest needed steps for the field to experimentally demonstrate causal links between children's theory of mind and their social actions and interactions.     

The psychology of memory,extended cognition,and socially distributed remembering

This paper introduces a new, expanded range of relevant cognitive psychological research on collaborative recall and social memory to the philosophical debate on extended and distributed cognition. We start by examining the case for extended cognition based on the complementarity of inner and outer resources, by which neural, bodily, social, and environmental resources with disparate but complementary properties are integrated into hybrid cognitive systems, transforming or augmenting the nature of remembering or decision-making. Adams and Aizawa, noting this distinctive complementarity argument, say that they agree with it completely: but they describe it as “a non-revolutionary approach” which leaves “the cognitive psychology of memory as the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous systems.” In response, we carve out, on distinct conceptual and empirical grounds, a rich middle ground between internalist forms of cognitivism and radical anti-cognitivism. Drawing both on extended cognition literature and on Sterelny’s account of the “scaffolded mind” (this issue), we develop a multidimensional framework for understanding varying relations between agents and external resources, both technological and social. On this basis we argue that, independent of any more “revolutionary” metaphysical claims about the partial constitution of cognitive processes by external resources, a thesis of scaffolded or distributed cognition can substantially influence or transform explanatory practice in cognitive science. Critics also cite various empirical results as evidence against the idea that remembering can extend beyond skull and skin. We respond with a more principled, representative survey of the scientific psychology of memory, focussing in particular on robust recent empirical traditions for the study of collaborative recall and transactive social memory. We describe our own empirical research on socially distributed remembering, aimed at identifying conditions for mnemonic emergence in collaborative groups. Philosophical debates about extended, embedded, and distributed cognition can thus make richer, mutually beneficial contact with independently motivated research programs in the cognitive psychology of memory.     

The role of social cognition in emotion

Although recent research has shown that social cognition and emotion engage overlapping regions of the brain, few accounts of this overlap have been offered. What systems might be commonly or distinctively involved in each? The close functional relationship between social cognition and emotion might be understood in terms of a central role for mental state attribution in the understanding, learning and regulation of emotion. In each of these cases, mental state attributions might be supported by either stimulus-driven or more reflective processes.     

The mismeasure of ape social cognition

Animal Cognition - In his classic analysis, Gould (The mismeasure of man, WW Norton, New York, 1981) demolished the idea that intelligence was an inherent, genetic trait of different human groups...     

Action, mindreading and embodied social cognition

One of the central insights of the embodied cognition (EC) movement is that cognition is closely tied to action. In this paper, I formulate an EC-inspired hypothesis concerning social cognition. In this domain, most think that our capacity to understand and interact with one another is best explained by appeal to some form of mindreading. I argue that prominent accounts of mindreading likely contain a significant lacuna. Evidence indicates that what I call an agent??s actional processes and states??her goals, needs, intentions, desires, and so on??likely play important roles in and for mindreading processes. If so, a full understanding of mindreading processes and their role in cognition more broadly will require an understanding of how actional mental processes interact with, influence, or take part in mindreading processes.     

Construction, reconstruction, deconstruction: The fall of the Soviet Union from the point of view of conceptual history

The fall of the Soviet Union is analysed in conceptual terms, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte. The author seeks to interpret the instrumental role of the concepts perestrojka, glasnost′, reform, revolution, socialist pluralism, and acceleration in the Soviet collapse. The semantics and pragmatics are related to a wider intellectual and political context, and the conceptual perspective is used to help explain the progress of events. The author argues that the common notion of the reform policy concepts as clichés is not valid.

The role of social cognition in early trust

Language serves as a means of learning from other people. However, communication systems allow the truth to be disguised, whether out of ignorance, fear, deviousness or mistaken judgment. Recent research has explored the extent to which young children are selective in whom they trust for information and the mechanisms that support such selectivity.     

Social emotions and social cognition in the development of social anxiety disorder

ABSTRACT

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most prevalent mental disorders with serious individual impairments and societal costs. Little is known about the mechanisms involved in SAD development. Here, I propose that dysregulated social emotions (social fear and shyness) are crucial for SAD development and that these dysregulated social emotions originate in the disturbances in socio-cognitive abilities. The research from our lab confirmed this. It showed that behavioural and physiological indices of social fear contribute to the development of SAD in toddlerhood and early childhood. Later in childhood, between ages 4.5 and 7.5, we found a new risk factor for SAD―dysregulated shyness. Specifically, we found that negative shy expressions and prolonged physiological blushing (temperature increase) contribute to SAD development. Whereas elevated fear may be rooted in deficits in socio-cognitive skills, dysregulated shyness may be rooted in advanced socio-cognitive abilities. These findings imply that dysregulated social emotions play an important role in SAD and should be explicitly targeted in clinical treatments of SAD.     

The relationship between autobiographical memory,cognition, and emotion in older adults: a review

Over the past 30 years, the concept of “autobiographical memory” has been highlighted in numerous behavioral and neuroanatomical studies. Importantly, episodic autobiographical memory, an aspect of autobiographical memory, has been shown to decrease with age but can be improved by training. Autobiographical memory is deeply associated with the default mode network (especially posterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex), which is particularly interesting in the context of better understanding the relationship between autobiographical memory, cognition, and emotion in older adults. This article provides an overview of the behavioral and neuroanatomical characteristics of autobiographical memory, as well as its relationship with the default mode network, cognition, emotion, and aging. This article also provides an overall review of autobiographical memory training.     

Reconnecting cognition in the lab and cognition in real life: The role of compensatory social and motivational factors in explaining how cognition ages in the wild

The papers in this Special Issue compellingly show that older adults' everyday cognitive life is governed not by the decline in elementary cognitive processes as measured in the lab, but by a multitude of compensatory mechanisms, most of which are of the social/motivational variety. Much of this compensatory behavior can be elicited with no or only little experimental prodding, underscoring the self-organizing or self-initiated nature of this type of behavior, even in advanced old age. We suggest that the study of compensation and the orchestration of cognitive, social, and motivational compensatory mechanisms in effective and healthy aging provides a meaningful challenge to traditional ways of examining developmental changes in cognitive performance.     

Bodily expressions,feelings, and the direct perception account of social cognition

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - In this paper, I will argue in favor of a direct perception account of social cognition (DP), focusing on the idea that we can directly grasp at least...