CDC Seminar April 1 Thursday Leonhard Schilbach

Leonard Schilbach (Psychiatry, Köln) A Second-Person Approach to Other Minds: Preliminary Evidence from Functional Neuroimaging Thursday, April 1, 3.00 pm CEU Cognitive Development Center Hattyuhaz, Level 3, Hattyu u. 14., 1015 Budapest Abstract Starting from the distinction between adopting a first- as compared to a third-person perspective of others' mental states, this presentation will attempt to argue for a second-person approach to understanding other minds. This approach is based on the idea that social cognition is fundamentally different when we are actively engaged with another person ('online' social cognition) as compared to being a mere observer of others. Furthermore the second-person account suggests to take the reciprocity of social interactions seriously by focusing on the different roles interactors play when initiating or responding to each others' actions. Subsequently, results of two sets of studies are presented which were based upon the above mentioned theoretical considerations. The first set of studies was realized to assess the neurobiological correlates (fMRI, EMG, eyetracking) of the perception of socially relevant facial expressions depending upon whether or not they were directed towards the human observer (as opposed to someone else; Schilbach et al. 2006, Mojzisch et al. 2006, Schilbach et al. 2008). A second paradigm was devised to investigate the neural correlates of joint attention in online interaction. To this end a novel fMRI-compatible eyetracking setup was devised which allows participants to interact with an anthropomorphic virtual character. Here, a crucial experimental manipulation consisted in varying whether participants initiated joint attention themselves or responded to someone else's gaze shifts (Wilms et al. in press; Schilbach et al. in press). Results of these studies highlight differential effects on neural processing both related to self-involvement and to the reciprocal nature of social interaction consistent with the idea of these being important constituents of social cognition. On a more speculative note, these results may be seen as preliminary evidence in support of the notion of a second-person approach to other minds which could help to further our understanding of the neurobiology of social cognition and may help to bridge recent findings in the burgeoning field of social neuroscience. -- Ágnes M. Kovács Marie Curie Research Fellow-DISCOS MTA PKI Hungarian Academy of Sciences & CEU, Cognitive Development Centre Budapest Hungary tel: +3612796095