Dean Mobbs PhD Dean Mobbs PhD

MRC-Cognition and Brain Sciences UnitMRC-Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit

Social Neuroscience Approach to Social Social Neuroscience Approach to Social CognitionCognition

May 22-25, 2008May 22-25, 2008

GhentGhent

Overview

•The Social Brain – Two Core Areas?.

•TP, Context and Faces Perception

•TP anatomy

•TP in Social Cognition and ToM

•Working Model of the Social Brain

•Some Future Directions

•Conclusions

Neural Systems in Social Cognition

Core Areas:

•Medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) = interpersonal norms and scripts. ToM.

•Temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) = Goals intentions and desires of others (?).

What about the temporal pole!!

•Right Temporal Pole (TP) = Special role in ToM, social schemas and concepts??

- drop-out, ROI “hypothesis driven” approach and lack of tasks/theory about the TP .

Van Overwalle, 2008

• Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov demonstrated that the manipulation of context can alter an audiences’ perceptions of an actor’s facial expressions, thoughts and feelings.

• Juxtaposing identical archived clips of actor Ivan Mozzhukhin’s face with either a scene of a funeral or a child playing led the audience to infer Mozzhukhin’s emotional disposition as subtly melancholic or elative, respectively

Context in Social Judgements: The Kuleshov Effect

Empirical studies of the Kuleshov effect

• Although Kuleshov’s observations were of a anecdotal nature, subsequent research has supported impact of contextual framing by showing that an observer can be influenced to perceive.

• Neutral faces as happy or sad (Wallbott, 1988).

• Angry facial expressions as fearful (Carroll and Russell, 1996).

• Screams as joyful (Goldberg, 1951).

We adapted the “Kuleshov Effect” paradigm to elucidate the neurobiological basis of contextual influences on emotional attributions

Methods

• Volunteers were explicitly rated emotional expression and mental-state (i.e. what the actor is thinking and feeling) from identical faces juxtaposed with negative, neutral and positively-valanced contexts

Mobbs et al. SCAN 2006

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100% Happy

100% Fear

Top-down

Bottom-up

Bottom-up

• Context is most effective when a facial expression is source clarity of the face is low and source clarity of the context is high*, we also used neutral faces and faces displaying subtly fearful and happy facial expressions

*Ekman, Friesen and Ellsworth, (1982)

Ambiguous

Methods…

Pseudo-candid photo manipulation

• To emphasize a link between the actors’ faces and the contextual movie and reduce demand characteristics we used a pseudo-candid photo manipulation with subjects being led to believe that the actors’ expressions were in response to viewing a juxtaposed movie

*Ekman, Friesen and Ellsworth, (1982)

Task Example

Mobbs et al. SCAN 2006

Short Movie Response Rate

Results: Main Effects

Mobbs et al. SCAN 2006

Results: Simple Interactions

Mobbs et al. SCAN 2006

fMRI Results: Parametric Analysis

Regions associated with increased +

attribution

Regions associated with increased -

attribution

O’Doherty et al. NN (2001)

Mobbs et al. SCAN 2006

• Contextual framing is likely to rely on activation of stored knowledge derived from real-world experiences.

• It has been theorized that the right temporal pole serves as a repository for contextual schema or frames.

• Involved in storage of contextual information, particularly when of emotional significance.

• Connections with the distinct regions of the PFC may result in retrieval of contextual and episodic information (Badre et al 2005; Dobbins et al 2002).

Conclusion

Temporal Pole

•Right TP - binds together diverse aspects of nonverbal social-emotional communication (prosody, gesture, facial expression, autonomic responses to social stimuli, social context, etc) that must be linked for us to detect sarcasm, irritation, sadness, etc. in others.

•Left TP binds processing streams related to word and object meaning (shape, colour, size, texture, and stored word representations must be linked for us to recognize and name - William Seeley – personal communication).

Temporal Pole and Ventral-Stream

FFASTS

Ventral Stream

Identity – structural components of the Face

Top-down retrieval of social and emotional

information

Temporal Pole Connectivity

Olson, Plozker and Ezzyat, 2007

mPFC

Obfc

FFASTS

Hypothalamus

Left Temporal Pole in Face Processing?

Rothstein et al Nature Neuroscience, 2005

Impaired familiarity with preserved recollection after anterior temporal-lobe resection that spares the hippocampus (Bowles et al. 2007)

Right Temporal Pole in Face Processing?

Calder et al, Current Biology, 2007

Studies on primates have shown the TP to contain faces and eye direction responsive cells

Kriegeskorte et al, PNAS, 2007

Role for the Temporal Pole in Social Cognition?

• Social attributions are likely to rely on activation of stored contextual schemata derived from experience (Levanthal and Scherer, 1987; Bar, 2004).

• Acquired lesions in the vicinity of the right TP can result in the loss of recognition of famous scenes, loss of memory for events and loss of person related knowledge (Tranel et al., 1997; Kitchener et al., 1999; Gorno-Tempini et al., 2004).

• Patients with right, but not left, TP atrophy due to the tv-FTD exhibit changes in personality and socially appropriate behaviour (Thompson et al., 2003).

• Where are social/cultural conventions stored?

Temporal Pole in Social Conceptualization

Zahn et al. PNAS 2007

Social Concepts (honor–brave) minus

animal concepts (nutritious–useful)

Positive (honour–brave) – negative (tactless–impolite) social concepts

TP rCBF change associated with the perception of ToM animations vs Random animations (Castelli et al 2000)

Olson, Plozker and Ezzyat, 2007

Temporal Pole and ToM

Simulation Theory?

• What would I do or expect someone to do in that situation?

• Another interpretation is that the TP has some role in encoding personal memories• (Nakamura and Kubota, 1995).

• Theory of mind tasks = TP utilizes personal memories to comprehend the state of mind of others (Moriguchi et al., 2006).

• Strongest correlation with appropriateness was the TP

Evidence of anterior temporal atrophy in college-level soccer players. (Adams et al. Clin J Sport Med. 2007)

http://www.zidaneheadbut.co.uk/

ToM Social Schemas

Appropriate/expected social behaviour

Right Temporal Pole

Social Concepts

People Knowledge

Emotional episodic memory

Social attention

Congruency

Low-level Perception of

Socially Relevant Information and Attention

STS= biological motion,

Social attention, eye direction,

intentions

R TPJ=

Goals intentions and desires of others, ToM

mPFC = interpersonal norms and

scripts. ToM

High-level Perception of

Social Information

R TP = Socioemotional scripts. ToM

Working Model of Social Cognition

Low High

Low level social signals

(e.g. FFA =faces,

EBA Bodies etc

L TP = Familiarity – History Scripts (in group/out group)

Stored knowledge/cache

Low-level Perception of

Socially Relevant Information and Attention

STS= biological motion,

Social attention, eye direction,

intentions

R TPJ=

Goals intentions and desires of others, ToM

mPFC = interpersonal norms and

scripts. ToM

High-level Perception of

Social Information

R TP = Socioemotional scripts. ToM

Working Model of Social Cognition

Low High

Low level social signals

(e.g. FFA =faces,

EBA Bodies etc

L TP = Familiarity – History Scripts (in group/out group)

Stored knowledge/cache

Future Research

• Dissociate regions using fMRI and lesion studies

• Temporal order using MEG

• Alternative approach to functional localizers and ROI focused studies

• Developmental studies of social cognition

• Novel methods to evoke ecologically-valid studies of social cognition

• Form a more elaborate model of the social brain

Acknowledgements

Chris Frith Ray Dolan

Andy Calder

And colleagues at the FIL and CBU Social and Affective

Neuroscience Group

Tim Dalgleish Bill Seeley

Questions?