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Brain Conference The Social Brain
5 - 8 October, 2014 Copenhagen, Denmark |
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Brain Conference The Social Brain
5 - 8 October, 2014 Copenhagen, Denmark |
| Venue: Moltkes Palæ (Corner of Bredgade & Dronningens Tværgade) | Organized by FENS & the Brain Prize |
| Co-chairs: |
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Sarah-Jayne Blakemore |
Frans de Waal |
Giacomo Rizzolatti |
| FENS is the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies. Practical organization: Mihaela Vincze & Lars Kristiansen (FENS executive director) |
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| Sunday, October 5 |
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Frans de Waal Emory University Mammalian origins of empathy and prosociality
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The Russian doll model of multilayered empathy. This model, introduced by de Waal, illustrates well the proceedings of the conference, which were comparative with studies ranging from those in fish to those in man.
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| The Russian doll model of multilayered empathy. The doll's inner core consists of the perception-action mechanism (PAM) that underlies state-matching and emotional contagion. Built around this hard-wired socioaffective basis, the doll's outer layers include sympathetic concern and targeted helping. The complexity of empathy grows with increasing perspective-taking capacities, which depend on prefrontal neural functioning, yet remain fundamentally connected to the PAM. A few large-brained species show all of the doll's layers, but most show only the inner ones (de Waal, 2012) |
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Andrew Whiten University of St. Andrews Imitation, culture, and the social brains of primates
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Pier Francesco Ferrari University of Parma Hard-wired, soft-wired and re-wired. Brain plasticity, sensorimotor experience and early social development in primates.
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| Monday, October 6 |
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Chris Frith UCL Metacognition, brain & culture
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| Sorry, here is a gap. I teach neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience at Copenhagen University and had to meet my students for discussions and a final lecture before their midterm exams. |
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Matthew Rushworth, University of Oxford. The medial frontal cortex and social cognition in humans and other primates |
Rushworth, M. F., Mars, R. B., & Sallet, J. (2013). Are there
specialized circuits for social cognition and are they unique to humans?
Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 23, 436-442. Notes: Discussions of the neural underpinnings of social cognition frequently emphasize the distinctiveness of human social cognition. Here, however, we review the discovery of similar correlations between neural networks and social networks in humans and other primates. We suggest that component parts of these neural networks in dorsal frontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and superior temporal sulcus (STS) are linked to basic social cognitive processes common to several primate species including monitoring the actions of others, assigning importance to others, and orienting behavior toward or away from others. Changes in activity in other brain regions occur in tandem with changes in social status and may be related to the different types of behaviors associated with variation in social status |
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Rogier Mars, University of Oxford. From monkey social cognition to human mentalizing
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Mars, R. B., Sallet, J., Neubert, F. X., & Rushworth, M.
F. (2013). Connectivity profiles reveal the relationship between brain
areas for social cognition in human and monkey temporoparietal cortex.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States
of America, 110, 10806-10811. Notes: The human ability to infer the thoughts and beliefs of others, often referred to as "theory of mind," as well as the predisposition to even consider others, are associated with activity in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) area. Unlike the case of most human brain areas, we have little sense of whether or how TPJ is related to brain areas in other nonhuman primates. It is not possible to address this question by looking for similar task-related activations in nonhuman primates because there is no evidence that nonhuman primates engage in theory-of-mind tasks in the same manner as humans. Here, instead, we explore the relationship by searching for areas in the macaque brain that interact with other macaque brain regions in the same manner as human TPJ interacts with other human brain regions. In other words, we look for brain regions with similar positions within a distributed neural circuit in the two species. We exploited the fact that human TPJ has a unique functional connectivity profile with cortical areas with known homologs in the macaque. For each voxel in the macaque temporal and parietal cortex we evaluated the similarity of its functional connectivity profile to that of human TPJ. We found that areas in the middle part of the superior temporal cortex, often associated with the processing of faces and other social stimuli, have the most similar connectivity profile. These results suggest that macaque face processing areas and human mentalizing areas might have a similar precursor |
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Natalie Sebanz, Central European University, Hungary: The mind in joint action |
selected references |
| Three short talks selected from the submitted posters: Tamara Franklin, Félice van Nunspeet, & Ivana Konvalinka |
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Colwyn Trevarthen University of Edinburgh Human alteroception: The psychobiology of compassion and cooperative knowledge before speech
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Evelyn Crone, Developmental changes in sensitivity to social evaluation |
Crone, E. A. & Dahl, R. E. (2012). Understanding adolescence as a period of social-affective engagement and goal flexibility. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13, 636-650. Research has demonstrated that extensive structural and functional brain development continues throughout adolescence. A popular notion emerging from this work states that a relative immaturity in frontal cortical neural systems could explain adolescents' high rates of risk-taking, substance use and other dangerous behaviours. However, developmental neuroimaging studies do not support a simple model of frontal cortical immaturity. Rather, growing evidence points to the importance of changes in social and affective processing, which begin around the onset of puberty, as crucial to understanding these adolescent vulnerabilities. These changes in social-affective processing also may confer some adaptive advantages, such as greater flexibility in adjusting one's intrinsic motivations and goal priorities amidst changing social contexts in adolescence |
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Sarah-Jayne Blakemore UCL The social brain in human adolescence
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Leah Somerville Harvard University Socioemotional development in adolescence
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| Tuesday, October 7 |
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Giacomo Rizzolatti University of Parma Understanding others from inside: a neural mechanism
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Harold Bekkering Donders Institute Predicting others' goal-directed actions
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Christian Keysers Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience The empathic brain and its plasticity
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James Kilner UCL The importance of the motor system in decoding the 'How' not the 'What' or 'Why' of observed actions
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| Coffee break and group photo |
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Giuseppe de Cesare University of Parma Insular representation of the vitality forms during observation, imagination and execution
One of 3 or 4 talks each day selected in advance from among the posters. Not all get equal coverage here. Sorry about that. |
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Di Cesare, G., Rochat, M. J., Sinigaglia, C., Bruschweiler-Stern, N.,
Stern, D. N. et al.
(2014). The neural correlates of 'vitality form' recognition: an fMRI
study. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9,
951-960. |
| Sukhvinder Obhi, McMaster University: The effects of personal and situational variables on motor resonance |
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Sasha Ondobaka Donders Institute Interregional connectivity minimizes surprise responses during action perception
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| Barbara Braams, Leiden University: Gambling for self, friends, and antagonists: differential contributions of affective and social brain regions on adolescent reward processing |
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Larry Young Emory University The neurobiology of social relationships: Implications for novel therapies for autism
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Richard Mooney Duke University Neural mechanisms of communication
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| Zebra finch brain |
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Russell Gray University of Auckland Can social and technical intelligence be decoupled? Cooperation, causal cognition and inferences about agency in New Caledonian crows
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Redouan Bshary University of Neuchatel The social brain hypothesis applied to fishes
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| Questions & discussions |
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| Wednesday, October 8 |
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Jaak Panksepp Washington State University Three primary-process animal social brain networks (PANIC, SEEKING, PLAY) and development of three new antiepressants for humans
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Lisa Parr Emory University The development of social attention in macaques
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Peggy Mason University of Chicago Helping another in distress: Lessons from rats
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| Three short presentations |
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Sarah Calcutt Emory University Chimpanzees in newly formed social groups choose high-risk social investments over low-risk ones |
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James Burkett Emory University Consoling behavior in the prairie vole: neurobiology and basis in empathy |
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Elena Dreosti UCL Development of social preferences in zebrafish
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Catherine Dulac Harvard University Neurobiology of social behavior in the mouse: From genes to circuits
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Last speaker: Vittorio Gallese University of Parma The body, symbolic expression and its experience: An experimental aesthetics perspective
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| Closing discussion |
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| Between closing discussion and gala dinner: 300 meters northeast and 300 meters south |
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| 6.15 PM Changing of the guard at Amalienborg (royal court) |
| 6.30-6.45 PM Nyhavn |
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| Gala dinner |
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Photography: Anders.Gade@psy.ku.dk |
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| My own poster |
Gade (red.) (2012) Den sociale hjerne. HjerneForum |
