[SydPhil] Fwd: Macquarie Cog Sci Seminar Tomorrow - Martin Bruene, 'Social cognition and the limbic lobe'

[John Sutton]

Fwd
Social cognition and the limbic lobe: New wine in old skins?

Speaker : Professor Martin Bruene, LWL University Hospital,
Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany.
Date : 7th of August 2012, 4:00PM until 5:30PM
Location : C5C498 - Palermo Room, Macquarie University.

“Social cognition” has been accepted as an umbrella term for a range
of cognitive abilities involved in understanding other people,
including social perception, emotion recognition, mentalising, and
attributional style, and, as is argued here, social decision-making.
The majority of neuroimaging studies have focused on a neural network
connecting parts of the prefrontal, the temporal and the parietal
cortex that is activated during performance of social cognitive tasks.
With the exception of emotion recognition tasks, relatively little
attention has been paid to the question as to what extent
non-neocortical structures are involved in social cognition. Here, it
shall be shown that some of the evolutionarily most “advanced” human
emotions such as empathy for pain and the recognition of trust and
reciprocity are anatomically represented in parts of the limbic lobe,
a phylogenetically older part of the brain. These neural substrates
are also activated during economic decision-making involving, for
example, the reciprocation of trust, rejection of unfairness and
“costly” punishment. Understanding the interplay of limbic structures
with neocortical regions can inform us not only about the neuronal
architecture of social decision-making in general, but also about the
ways, people with psychological illnesses recognize and respond to
challenges from their social environment.

-- 
Professor John Sutton
Department of Cognitive Science (http://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/)
Macquarie University, Sydney,
NSW 2109, Australia
Phone: +61 (0)2 9850 4132
Email: john.sutton at mq.edu.au
URL: http://www.johnsutton.net/

Memory Studies journal: http://mss.sagepub.com/