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Department of Cognitive Science

Seminar Abstract

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.