13.00: Welcome and introduction by Josh Skewes

13.10: David Amodio

13.50: Idalmis Santiesteban

14.30: Break

14.45: Dan Zahavi

15.25: Karsten Olsen

16.05: Discussion (moderator: Andreas Roepstorff)

David Amodio:

Learning about people through feedback: Instrumental social learning in behavior and the brain

 Social impressions are often built on feedback we receive from others during interpersonal interactions, yet little is known about the role of reinforcement in social inference. I will describe new research from my lab on instrumental learning in social cognition and intergroup processing. Using computational modeling of behavior and neuroimaging, we show that trait impressions are formed above and beyond the mere reward value of feedback, and that while both value- and trait-learning involve the ventral striatum, trait-level learning uniquely involves “social cognition network” activity. We also find that social group membership moderates how people learn from feedback. These findings reveal a role for instrumental learning in social perception, further supporting a multiple memory systems model of social cognition.

Idalmis Santiesteban:

"Mentalising or submentalising in perspective-taking tasks: evidence from behavioural and brain stimulation studies"

Successful social interactions rely on the ability to attribute mental states to our interacting partners. This ability is known as mentalising or having theory of mind. Mentalising has been a major focus of philosophical investigation for centuries, and of scientific enquiry for the last 37 years. After decades in which studies of children and animals dominated the field, research on mentalising is now investigating how and when mature adult humans use representations of what others see, think, know, and intend in order to navigate the social world. One school of thought suggests that mentalising is pervasive; we use it constantly to predict what others are going to do in nonverbal social interactions. Another suggests that mentalising is used sparingly: Routine prediction and decoding are done by domain-general psychological processes.

In this talk, I will present findings from behavioural and TMS studies supporting the view that sometimes human behaviour that appears to be guided by mentalising could instead be based on “submentalising”- on domain-general cognitive processes that simulate the effects of mentalising in social contexts. 

Dan Zahavi:

"Varieties of shared intentionality: Tomasello and classical phenomenology"

In my talk, I will discuss certain claims found in Tomasello’s recent book The Origins of Thinking and explore to what extent they can be supported and/or challenged by ideas found in classical phenomenology.

Karsten Olsen:

"Interaction and interactive experimental paradigms: what do they tell us about social cognition and sociality?"

The human capacity for sociality enables us to take advantage of social interaction. Specifically, we are able to obtain information from each other when we are interacting, which we potentially use to improve learning and decision-making and which, in turn, may advance our social groups and cooperative societies. This part of the workshop will therefore highlight the important role of interaction in a decision-making context, under the assumption that we often make decisions in the context of other individuals, either via observation or in interaction with them. This talk will present a number of interactive experimental paradigms that has been used to study observational as well as interactive learning and decision-making, and argue that we need more detailed theoretical work that incorporates interaction. That is, we need models that go beyond accounting for classical social cognition (accounting for isolated individual viewing social stimuli) and make clear predictions about how social interaction influence and shapes behaviour and, ultimately, the capacity for sociality.