This workshop aims at reviewing and discussing current methodological challenges and perspectives for measuring of Theory of Mind, empathy and related social behaviours by bringing together researchers from cognitive, neuroscientific, and philosophical fields. In a first part, the meaning of observed differences and overlaps between cognitive tests of social behaviour will be discussed. Second, a novel perspective on how social knowledge might be implemented in terms of representational spaces in the brain is presented. Finally, classical and more recent philosophical theories of social understanding will be reviewed, and discussed with relation to psychological and neuroscientific research.

It feels intuitively true that some people are more socially able than others, and given the extensive research interest in mindreading, it seems natural to expect that variation in mindreading might help explain variation in social ability. Testing these expectations requires good measures of social ability and of mindreading. However, both turn out to be difficult to achieve. Common measures of social ability rely on self-report, which may be challenging for individuals with low social ability. Common measures of mindreading suffer from low validity, low transparency, low variance, or some combination of these problems. I will highlight the strong points of previous work, exciting work from several groups who are tackling these problems, and some directions for further advances.

Social life requires people to predict the future: we must anticipate others’ thoughts, feelings, and actions in order to interact with them successfully. How do our brains supply us with these essential glimpses of the social future? In this talk, I will describe a framework for modeling predictive social cognition. This theory posits, first, that the mind organizes social knowledge – i.e., representations of others’ traits, mental states, and actions – using low-dimensional representational spaces. Second, these representational spaces not only allow us to grasp the richness of others’ minds, but also provide a scaffolding for making social predictions. Specifically, proximity within these spaces predicts the likelihood of transitions between emotions and behaviors. This framework has emerged from, and been tested in, recent neuroimaging investigations of mental state and trait representation. These investigations have, in turn, relied on the use of nascent multivariate analysis methods, such as representational similarity analysis and voxelwise encoding models. In the first portion of the talk, I will discuss how these techniques have shed light on the neural organization of social knowledge. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss how these methods have also improved our understanding of the social brain’s predictive processes. Together, these findings will illustrate how the development of sophisticated neuroimaging methods and formal psychological theories naturally complement each other in the service of understand the social mind.

Registration

Registration fee: €50

Registration deadline: August 31st, 2018

A confirmation of receipt will be sent within 10 days after registration

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