A core symptom of schizophrenia is a deficit in social cognition. Furthermore, many patients suff... more A core symptom of schizophrenia is a deficit in social cognition. Furthermore, many patients suffer from relevant social anxiety. How social anxiety relates to social avoidance in schizophrenia is, however, still unclear. To address this question empirically, 30 participants with schizophrenia were compared to individually matched controls in a recently developed experimental task. In each trial, participants chose between a monetary gamble with a human partner providing social feedback and a defined monetary amount that varied across trials. The tendency to avoid the interaction under acceptance of monetary loss served as a measure of social avoidance. Patients showed higher levels of social anxiety assessed using the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) than controls, took longer to decide whether to engage in the social interaction and rated social feedback as less intense. Despite making rational decisions, patients surprisingly showed no social avoidance. We assume that the la...
Situated cognition embeds perceptions, thoughts, and behavior within the contextual framework of ... more Situated cognition embeds perceptions, thoughts, and behavior within the contextual framework of so-called "4E cognition" understanding cognition to be embodied, enactive, extended, and embedded. Whereas this definition is primarily based on the spatial properties of a situation, it neglects a fundamental constituent: the cognitive situation as enduring. On a subpersonal level, situated cognition requires the integration of information processing within a minimal temporal extension generating the basic building blocks of perception and action ("microlayer" of time). On a personal level, lived situations and experienced narratives leading to our biography can be defined by their broader temporal horizons ("macrolayer" of time). The macrolayer of time is based on and emerges from information processing on the microlayer of time. Whereas the constraints on the microlayer are primarily defined by the integrity of neurobiological processes within an individual cognitive system, the temporal horizons and subsequently the situational context on the macrolayer are defined by the complex affordances of a situation on a personal or interpersonal level. On both time layers, cognition can be defined as a continuous dynamic process, reflecting the transition from one situated state to another. Taken together, the events forming the delimiting horizons of these situations correspond to the temporal structure of the cognitive process along which it continuously proceeds. The dynamic driving and enabling this transition from state to state is synonymous with the inherent flow of time. Just as the layers of time, flow and structure, are inseparably connected. The integration of temporal flow and temporal structure into the continuous dynamic process constitutes the enduring situatedness of cognition. By providing everyday examples and examples from psychopathology, we highlight the benefits of understanding cognitive processes as part of enduring situations.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which... more This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
ABSTRACTWe simultaneously revisited the ADI-R and ADOS with a comprehensive data-analytics strate... more ABSTRACTWe simultaneously revisited the ADI-R and ADOS with a comprehensive data-analytics strategy. Here, the combination of pattern analysis algorithms and an extensive data resources (n=266 patients aged 7 to 49 years) allowed identifying coherent clinical constellations in and across ADI-R and ADOS assessments widespread in clinical practice. The collective results of the clustering and sparse regression approaches suggest that identifying autism subtypes and severity for a given individual may be most manifested in the social and communication domains of the ADI-R. Additionally, our quantitative investigation revealed that disease-specific patterns of ADI-R and ADOS scores can be uncovered when studying sex, age or level of FIQ in patients.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland), Jan 8, 2018
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This makes the... more Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This makes the emerging "second-person approach" to social cognition a more promising framework for studying ASD than classical approaches focusing on mindreading capacities in detached, observer-based arrangements. According to the second-person approach, embodied, perceptual, and embedded or interactive capabilities are also required for understanding others, and these are hypothesized to be compromised in ASD. We therefore recorded the dynamics of real-time sensorimotor interaction in pairs of control participants and participants with High-Functioning Autism (HFA), using the minimalistic human-computer interface paradigm known as "perceptual crossing" (PC). We investigated whether HFA is associated with impaired detection of social contingency, i.e., a reduced sensitivity to the other's responsiveness to one's own behavior. Surprisingly, our analysis reveals that, at le...
In conversation, speakers typically draw attention to items that are meant to be informative by p... more In conversation, speakers typically draw attention to items that are meant to be informative by pronouncing the words referring to these items in a particular way. These words have a distinct intonation, and are accented-typically involving a rise or fall in vocal pitch on the stressed syllable. Listeners use this information to know which part of the sentence is new, and therefore worthy of attention. In a perception study, adults with Asperger syndrome (AS) and a group of control persons were instructed to rate the informativeness of words, based on how they sounded. The AS group showed a reduced sensitivity to intonation and subsequently based their judgement less on the way the word was pronounced and more on word frequency and semantic features of the words themselves. This finding is in concordance with a general reduced sensitivity to non-verbal cues in social encounters and to a propensity towards literal interpretation in the group of persons with AS.
Der vorliegende Band widmet sich einem zentralen Problem der Psychopathologie und Psychiatrie, vi... more Der vorliegende Band widmet sich einem zentralen Problem der Psychopathologie und Psychiatrie, vielleicht dem wichtigsten Problem überhaupt, nämlich der Frage, was es bedeutet, psychisch krank zu sein und wo die Grenzen zwischen psychischer Gesundheit und Krankheit verlaufen. Klassische Positionen in dieser Diskussion stellen einerseits naturalistische Konzeptionen dar, denen zufolge psychische Krankheit auf den Ausfall bestimmter natürlich gegebener Fähigkeiten zurückführbar ist, die zumindest prinzipiell auch naturwissenschaftlich erforschbar sein sollten; andererseits tragen normativistische Theorien vor, dass die Abgrenzung psychischer Krankheiten von Zuständen der Gesundheit nicht ohne den Rückgriff auf Normen denkbar ist, die beispielsweise historisch oder gesellschaftlich definiert sind. In der täglichen Praxis ist die Zuschreibung von psychischer Krankheit auf den ersten Blick denkbar einfach, weil psychiatrisch tätige Ärzte oder klinische Psychologen nach international erarbeiteten Checklisten vorgehen und Symptome identifizieren, die für bestimmte Zeiträume nachweisbar sein müssen, um eine psychische Krankheit zu definieren. Weltweit existieren zwei relevante operationalisierte Klassifikationskriterienkataloge dieser Art, nämlich die von der Weltgesundheitsorganisation vertretene „International Classification of Disease“ in der zehnten Version, kurz: ICD10, und das von der nordamerikanischen Psychiatrie vertretene „Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders“, das 2013 in der fünften Version, kurz: DSM-5, veröffentlicht wurde. Konkret wurde zuletzt die Diskussion um den psychiatrischen Krankheitsbegriff wieder angefacht, weil in der DSM-5 die Schwellen für die Diagnostizierbarkeit mancher psychischen Krankheiten gesenkt wurden, einige psychische Krankheiten also früher und bei weniger prominenten Symptomen diagnostiziert
Soziale Integration und besonders die berufliche Eingliederung stellen für Menschen mit psychisch... more Soziale Integration und besonders die berufliche Eingliederung stellen für Menschen mit psychischen Erkrankungen zentrale Behandlungsziele dar, beides hat entscheidenden Einfluss auf den Verlauf ihrer Erkrankungen. Im ersten Teil stellen wir allgemeine Grundsätze zur beruflichen Rehabilitation psychisch kranker Menschen dar, charakterisieren die in Deutschland verfügbaren beruflichen Rehabilitationsmaßnahmen und setzen wir uns mit aktuell scheinbar konkurrierenden Konzepten zur Implementierung auseinander.
The concept of mirror neurons postulates a neuronal network that represents both observation and ... more The concept of mirror neurons postulates a neuronal network that represents both observation and execution of goal-directed behavior and is taken as evidence for the validity of the simulation theory, according to which human sUbjects use their own mental states to predict or explain mental processes of others. However, the concept of mirror neurons does not address the question, whether there is a specific difference between the other individual observed and myself, between first-person-and third-person-perspective. Addressing this issue, a functional magnetic resonance imaging study is presented that varies first-person-and third-person perspective systematically. A classical theory of mind paradigm was employed and extended to include first-person-and third-person-perspective stimuli. During the involvement of third person-perspective increased neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and lett temporopolar cortex was observed. During the involvement of first-person-perspective material increased neural activity in the right temporoparietal junction and in the anterior cingulate cortex was found. A significant interaction of both perspectives activated the right prefrontal cortex. These data suggest that these different perspectives are implemented at least in part in distinct brain regions. With respect to the debate on simulation theory, this result rejects the exclusive validity of simulation theory.
Abstract: The target article's approach is applauded, but it is suggested that the “dark mat... more Abstract: The target article's approach is applauded, but it is suggested that the “dark matter” may be much larger than even the current authors suspect. Cartesian and mechanistic assumptions infuse not only the discipline of cognitive psychology, but all societal accounts of the person. A switch to dynamical accounts in which lawfulness is observed within a given systemic context is suggested.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a spectrum of neurodevelopmental conditions characterized by di... more Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a spectrum of neurodevelopmental conditions characterized by difficulties in social communication and social interaction as well as repetitive behaviors and restricted interests. Prevalence rates have been rising, and existing diagnostic methods are both extremely time and labor consuming. There is an urgent need for more economic and objective automatized diagnostic tools that are independent of language and experience of the diagnostician and that can help deal with the complexity of the autistic phenotype. Technological advancements in machine learning are offering a potential solution, and several studies have employed computational approaches to classify ASD based on phenomenological, behavioral or neuroimaging data. Despite of being at the core of ASD diagnosis and having the potential to be used as a behavioral marker for machine learning algorithms, only recently have movement parameters been used as features in machine learning classification approaches. In a proof-of-principle analysis of data from a social interaction study we trained a classification algorithm on intrapersonal synchrony as an automatically and objectively measured phenotypic feature from 29 autistic and 29 typically developed individuals to differentiate those individuals with ASD from those without ASD. Parameters included nonverbal motion energy values from 116 videos of social interactions. As opposed to previous studies to date, our classification approach has been applied to non-verbal behavior objectively captured during naturalistic and complex interactions with a real human interaction partner assuring high external validity. A machine learning approach lends itself particularly for capturing heterogeneous and complex behavior in real social interactions and will be essential in developing automatized and objective classification methods in ASD.
In a production experiment and two follow-up perception experiments on read German we investigate... more In a production experiment and two follow-up perception experiments on read German we investigated the relation between givenness (also called information status) and prosody based on a cognitive activation cost model. Previous studies provide evidence that it is the tonal configuration which is important for encoding a referent's degree of givenness and that different types of more or less activated information demand different accent types as linguistic markers. Therefore, we assume that changes in the degree of a referent's givenness are reflected in corresponding changes in its degree of prosodic prominence. Our production and perception data on the prosody of discourse referents reflecting four different levels of givenness confirm this assumption: The prosodic prominence increases as the degree of a referent's givenness decreases. Furthermore, perception data reveal a stepwise decrease in the degree of perceived givenness from deaccentuation and prenuclear accents through low and early peak nuclear accents to high and rising nuclear accents. Taken together, the experiments indicate that the degree of prosodic prominence can serve as the decisive cue for decoding a referent's level of givenness. Furthermore, the results contribute to the growing body of evidence for the relevance of different intermediate types of information status between the poles given and new.
Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 2013
Attributions are constantly assigned in everyday life. A well-known phenomenon is the self-servin... more Attributions are constantly assigned in everyday life. A well-known phenomenon is the self-serving bias: that is, people's tendency to attribute positive events to internal causes (themselves) and negative events to external causes (other persons/circumstances). Here, we investigated the neural correlates of the cognitive processes implicated in self-serving attributions using social situations that differed in their emotional saliences. We administered an attributional bias task during fMRI scanning in a large sample of healthy subjects (n = 71). Eighty sentences describing positive or negative social situations were presented, and subjects decided via buttonpress whether the situation had been caused by themselves or by the other person involved. Comparing positive with negative sentences revealed activations of the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Self-attribution correlated with activation of the posterior portion of the precuneus. However, self-attributed positive versus negative sentences showed activation of the anterior
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
It is the aim of this article to present an empirically justified hypothesis about the functional... more It is the aim of this article to present an empirically justified hypothesis about the functional roles of the two social neural systems, namely the so-called ‘mirror neuron system’ (MNS) and the ‘mentalizing system’ (MENT, also ‘theory of mind network’ or ‘social neural network’). Both systems are recruited during cognitive processes that are either related to interaction or communication with other conspecifics, thereby constituting intersubjectivity. The hypothesis is developed in the following steps: first, the fundamental distinction that we make between persons and things is introduced; second, communication is presented as the key process that allows us to interact with others; third, the capacity to ‘mentalize’ or to understand the inner experience of others is emphasized as the fundamental cognitive capacity required to establish successful communication. On this background, it is proposed that MNS serves comparably early stages of social information processing related to t...
Human self-consciousness depends on the metarepresentation of mental and bodily states as one'... more Human self-consciousness depends on the metarepresentation of mental and bodily states as one's own mental and bodily states. First-person-perspective taking is not sufficient, but necessary for human self-consciousness. To assign a first-person-perspective is to center one's own multimodal experiential space upon one's own body, thus operating in an egocentric reference frame. The brain regions involved in assigning first-person-perspective comprise medial prefrontal, medial parietal and lateral temporoparietal cortex. These empirical findings complement recent neurobiologically oriented theories of self-consciousness which focus on the relation between the subject and his/her environment by supplying a neural basis for its key components.
Visual pseudohallucinations are reported on in a patient with a left lower quadrantanopia due to ... more Visual pseudohallucinations are reported on in a patient with a left lower quadrantanopia due to a right parietotemporal surgical defect after tumour removal. Besides metamorphopsia, he hallucinated the lower half of human figures which were limited to within the borders of the anopic defect and appeared “amputated” at the hip with one forearm and hand appearing from above in correct anatomical position. The lower half of these human figures was perceived as correctly scaled in relation to anatomical and environmental coordinates and was recognised as unreal. These pseudohallucinations led to the concept of an “aperture effect” which alludes to the visibility through the anopic field defect of a segment of the contents of the visual association cortex. This supports the idea of a pictorial mode for representation of endogenously generated images in the visual association cortex.
A core symptom of schizophrenia is a deficit in social cognition. Furthermore, many patients suff... more A core symptom of schizophrenia is a deficit in social cognition. Furthermore, many patients suffer from relevant social anxiety. How social anxiety relates to social avoidance in schizophrenia is, however, still unclear. To address this question empirically, 30 participants with schizophrenia were compared to individually matched controls in a recently developed experimental task. In each trial, participants chose between a monetary gamble with a human partner providing social feedback and a defined monetary amount that varied across trials. The tendency to avoid the interaction under acceptance of monetary loss served as a measure of social avoidance. Patients showed higher levels of social anxiety assessed using the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) than controls, took longer to decide whether to engage in the social interaction and rated social feedback as less intense. Despite making rational decisions, patients surprisingly showed no social avoidance. We assume that the la...
Situated cognition embeds perceptions, thoughts, and behavior within the contextual framework of ... more Situated cognition embeds perceptions, thoughts, and behavior within the contextual framework of so-called "4E cognition" understanding cognition to be embodied, enactive, extended, and embedded. Whereas this definition is primarily based on the spatial properties of a situation, it neglects a fundamental constituent: the cognitive situation as enduring. On a subpersonal level, situated cognition requires the integration of information processing within a minimal temporal extension generating the basic building blocks of perception and action ("microlayer" of time). On a personal level, lived situations and experienced narratives leading to our biography can be defined by their broader temporal horizons ("macrolayer" of time). The macrolayer of time is based on and emerges from information processing on the microlayer of time. Whereas the constraints on the microlayer are primarily defined by the integrity of neurobiological processes within an individual cognitive system, the temporal horizons and subsequently the situational context on the macrolayer are defined by the complex affordances of a situation on a personal or interpersonal level. On both time layers, cognition can be defined as a continuous dynamic process, reflecting the transition from one situated state to another. Taken together, the events forming the delimiting horizons of these situations correspond to the temporal structure of the cognitive process along which it continuously proceeds. The dynamic driving and enabling this transition from state to state is synonymous with the inherent flow of time. Just as the layers of time, flow and structure, are inseparably connected. The integration of temporal flow and temporal structure into the continuous dynamic process constitutes the enduring situatedness of cognition. By providing everyday examples and examples from psychopathology, we highlight the benefits of understanding cognitive processes as part of enduring situations.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which... more This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
ABSTRACTWe simultaneously revisited the ADI-R and ADOS with a comprehensive data-analytics strate... more ABSTRACTWe simultaneously revisited the ADI-R and ADOS with a comprehensive data-analytics strategy. Here, the combination of pattern analysis algorithms and an extensive data resources (n=266 patients aged 7 to 49 years) allowed identifying coherent clinical constellations in and across ADI-R and ADOS assessments widespread in clinical practice. The collective results of the clustering and sparse regression approaches suggest that identifying autism subtypes and severity for a given individual may be most manifested in the social and communication domains of the ADI-R. Additionally, our quantitative investigation revealed that disease-specific patterns of ADI-R and ADOS scores can be uncovered when studying sex, age or level of FIQ in patients.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland), Jan 8, 2018
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This makes the... more Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This makes the emerging "second-person approach" to social cognition a more promising framework for studying ASD than classical approaches focusing on mindreading capacities in detached, observer-based arrangements. According to the second-person approach, embodied, perceptual, and embedded or interactive capabilities are also required for understanding others, and these are hypothesized to be compromised in ASD. We therefore recorded the dynamics of real-time sensorimotor interaction in pairs of control participants and participants with High-Functioning Autism (HFA), using the minimalistic human-computer interface paradigm known as "perceptual crossing" (PC). We investigated whether HFA is associated with impaired detection of social contingency, i.e., a reduced sensitivity to the other's responsiveness to one's own behavior. Surprisingly, our analysis reveals that, at le...
In conversation, speakers typically draw attention to items that are meant to be informative by p... more In conversation, speakers typically draw attention to items that are meant to be informative by pronouncing the words referring to these items in a particular way. These words have a distinct intonation, and are accented-typically involving a rise or fall in vocal pitch on the stressed syllable. Listeners use this information to know which part of the sentence is new, and therefore worthy of attention. In a perception study, adults with Asperger syndrome (AS) and a group of control persons were instructed to rate the informativeness of words, based on how they sounded. The AS group showed a reduced sensitivity to intonation and subsequently based their judgement less on the way the word was pronounced and more on word frequency and semantic features of the words themselves. This finding is in concordance with a general reduced sensitivity to non-verbal cues in social encounters and to a propensity towards literal interpretation in the group of persons with AS.
Der vorliegende Band widmet sich einem zentralen Problem der Psychopathologie und Psychiatrie, vi... more Der vorliegende Band widmet sich einem zentralen Problem der Psychopathologie und Psychiatrie, vielleicht dem wichtigsten Problem überhaupt, nämlich der Frage, was es bedeutet, psychisch krank zu sein und wo die Grenzen zwischen psychischer Gesundheit und Krankheit verlaufen. Klassische Positionen in dieser Diskussion stellen einerseits naturalistische Konzeptionen dar, denen zufolge psychische Krankheit auf den Ausfall bestimmter natürlich gegebener Fähigkeiten zurückführbar ist, die zumindest prinzipiell auch naturwissenschaftlich erforschbar sein sollten; andererseits tragen normativistische Theorien vor, dass die Abgrenzung psychischer Krankheiten von Zuständen der Gesundheit nicht ohne den Rückgriff auf Normen denkbar ist, die beispielsweise historisch oder gesellschaftlich definiert sind. In der täglichen Praxis ist die Zuschreibung von psychischer Krankheit auf den ersten Blick denkbar einfach, weil psychiatrisch tätige Ärzte oder klinische Psychologen nach international erarbeiteten Checklisten vorgehen und Symptome identifizieren, die für bestimmte Zeiträume nachweisbar sein müssen, um eine psychische Krankheit zu definieren. Weltweit existieren zwei relevante operationalisierte Klassifikationskriterienkataloge dieser Art, nämlich die von der Weltgesundheitsorganisation vertretene „International Classification of Disease“ in der zehnten Version, kurz: ICD10, und das von der nordamerikanischen Psychiatrie vertretene „Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders“, das 2013 in der fünften Version, kurz: DSM-5, veröffentlicht wurde. Konkret wurde zuletzt die Diskussion um den psychiatrischen Krankheitsbegriff wieder angefacht, weil in der DSM-5 die Schwellen für die Diagnostizierbarkeit mancher psychischen Krankheiten gesenkt wurden, einige psychische Krankheiten also früher und bei weniger prominenten Symptomen diagnostiziert
Soziale Integration und besonders die berufliche Eingliederung stellen für Menschen mit psychisch... more Soziale Integration und besonders die berufliche Eingliederung stellen für Menschen mit psychischen Erkrankungen zentrale Behandlungsziele dar, beides hat entscheidenden Einfluss auf den Verlauf ihrer Erkrankungen. Im ersten Teil stellen wir allgemeine Grundsätze zur beruflichen Rehabilitation psychisch kranker Menschen dar, charakterisieren die in Deutschland verfügbaren beruflichen Rehabilitationsmaßnahmen und setzen wir uns mit aktuell scheinbar konkurrierenden Konzepten zur Implementierung auseinander.
The concept of mirror neurons postulates a neuronal network that represents both observation and ... more The concept of mirror neurons postulates a neuronal network that represents both observation and execution of goal-directed behavior and is taken as evidence for the validity of the simulation theory, according to which human sUbjects use their own mental states to predict or explain mental processes of others. However, the concept of mirror neurons does not address the question, whether there is a specific difference between the other individual observed and myself, between first-person-and third-person-perspective. Addressing this issue, a functional magnetic resonance imaging study is presented that varies first-person-and third-person perspective systematically. A classical theory of mind paradigm was employed and extended to include first-person-and third-person-perspective stimuli. During the involvement of third person-perspective increased neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and lett temporopolar cortex was observed. During the involvement of first-person-perspective material increased neural activity in the right temporoparietal junction and in the anterior cingulate cortex was found. A significant interaction of both perspectives activated the right prefrontal cortex. These data suggest that these different perspectives are implemented at least in part in distinct brain regions. With respect to the debate on simulation theory, this result rejects the exclusive validity of simulation theory.
Abstract: The target article's approach is applauded, but it is suggested that the “dark mat... more Abstract: The target article's approach is applauded, but it is suggested that the “dark matter” may be much larger than even the current authors suspect. Cartesian and mechanistic assumptions infuse not only the discipline of cognitive psychology, but all societal accounts of the person. A switch to dynamical accounts in which lawfulness is observed within a given systemic context is suggested.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a spectrum of neurodevelopmental conditions characterized by di... more Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a spectrum of neurodevelopmental conditions characterized by difficulties in social communication and social interaction as well as repetitive behaviors and restricted interests. Prevalence rates have been rising, and existing diagnostic methods are both extremely time and labor consuming. There is an urgent need for more economic and objective automatized diagnostic tools that are independent of language and experience of the diagnostician and that can help deal with the complexity of the autistic phenotype. Technological advancements in machine learning are offering a potential solution, and several studies have employed computational approaches to classify ASD based on phenomenological, behavioral or neuroimaging data. Despite of being at the core of ASD diagnosis and having the potential to be used as a behavioral marker for machine learning algorithms, only recently have movement parameters been used as features in machine learning classification approaches. In a proof-of-principle analysis of data from a social interaction study we trained a classification algorithm on intrapersonal synchrony as an automatically and objectively measured phenotypic feature from 29 autistic and 29 typically developed individuals to differentiate those individuals with ASD from those without ASD. Parameters included nonverbal motion energy values from 116 videos of social interactions. As opposed to previous studies to date, our classification approach has been applied to non-verbal behavior objectively captured during naturalistic and complex interactions with a real human interaction partner assuring high external validity. A machine learning approach lends itself particularly for capturing heterogeneous and complex behavior in real social interactions and will be essential in developing automatized and objective classification methods in ASD.
In a production experiment and two follow-up perception experiments on read German we investigate... more In a production experiment and two follow-up perception experiments on read German we investigated the relation between givenness (also called information status) and prosody based on a cognitive activation cost model. Previous studies provide evidence that it is the tonal configuration which is important for encoding a referent's degree of givenness and that different types of more or less activated information demand different accent types as linguistic markers. Therefore, we assume that changes in the degree of a referent's givenness are reflected in corresponding changes in its degree of prosodic prominence. Our production and perception data on the prosody of discourse referents reflecting four different levels of givenness confirm this assumption: The prosodic prominence increases as the degree of a referent's givenness decreases. Furthermore, perception data reveal a stepwise decrease in the degree of perceived givenness from deaccentuation and prenuclear accents through low and early peak nuclear accents to high and rising nuclear accents. Taken together, the experiments indicate that the degree of prosodic prominence can serve as the decisive cue for decoding a referent's level of givenness. Furthermore, the results contribute to the growing body of evidence for the relevance of different intermediate types of information status between the poles given and new.
Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 2013
Attributions are constantly assigned in everyday life. A well-known phenomenon is the self-servin... more Attributions are constantly assigned in everyday life. A well-known phenomenon is the self-serving bias: that is, people's tendency to attribute positive events to internal causes (themselves) and negative events to external causes (other persons/circumstances). Here, we investigated the neural correlates of the cognitive processes implicated in self-serving attributions using social situations that differed in their emotional saliences. We administered an attributional bias task during fMRI scanning in a large sample of healthy subjects (n = 71). Eighty sentences describing positive or negative social situations were presented, and subjects decided via buttonpress whether the situation had been caused by themselves or by the other person involved. Comparing positive with negative sentences revealed activations of the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Self-attribution correlated with activation of the posterior portion of the precuneus. However, self-attributed positive versus negative sentences showed activation of the anterior
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
It is the aim of this article to present an empirically justified hypothesis about the functional... more It is the aim of this article to present an empirically justified hypothesis about the functional roles of the two social neural systems, namely the so-called ‘mirror neuron system’ (MNS) and the ‘mentalizing system’ (MENT, also ‘theory of mind network’ or ‘social neural network’). Both systems are recruited during cognitive processes that are either related to interaction or communication with other conspecifics, thereby constituting intersubjectivity. The hypothesis is developed in the following steps: first, the fundamental distinction that we make between persons and things is introduced; second, communication is presented as the key process that allows us to interact with others; third, the capacity to ‘mentalize’ or to understand the inner experience of others is emphasized as the fundamental cognitive capacity required to establish successful communication. On this background, it is proposed that MNS serves comparably early stages of social information processing related to t...
Human self-consciousness depends on the metarepresentation of mental and bodily states as one'... more Human self-consciousness depends on the metarepresentation of mental and bodily states as one's own mental and bodily states. First-person-perspective taking is not sufficient, but necessary for human self-consciousness. To assign a first-person-perspective is to center one's own multimodal experiential space upon one's own body, thus operating in an egocentric reference frame. The brain regions involved in assigning first-person-perspective comprise medial prefrontal, medial parietal and lateral temporoparietal cortex. These empirical findings complement recent neurobiologically oriented theories of self-consciousness which focus on the relation between the subject and his/her environment by supplying a neural basis for its key components.
Visual pseudohallucinations are reported on in a patient with a left lower quadrantanopia due to ... more Visual pseudohallucinations are reported on in a patient with a left lower quadrantanopia due to a right parietotemporal surgical defect after tumour removal. Besides metamorphopsia, he hallucinated the lower half of human figures which were limited to within the borders of the anopic defect and appeared “amputated” at the hip with one forearm and hand appearing from above in correct anatomical position. The lower half of these human figures was perceived as correctly scaled in relation to anatomical and environmental coordinates and was recognised as unreal. These pseudohallucinations led to the concept of an “aperture effect” which alludes to the visibility through the anopic field defect of a segment of the contents of the visual association cortex. This supports the idea of a pictorial mode for representation of endogenously generated images in the visual association cortex.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This makes the... more Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This makes the emerging “second-person approach” to social cognition a more promising framework for studying ASD than classical approaches focusing on mindreading capacities in detached, observer-based arrangements. According to the second-person approach, embodied, perceptual, and embedded or interactive capabilities are also required for understanding others, and these are hypothesized to be compromised in ASD. We therefore recorded the dynamics of real-time sensorimotor interaction in pairs of control participants and participants with High-Functioning Autism (HFA), using the minimalistic human-computer interface paradigm known as “perceptual crossing” (PC). We investigated whether HFA is associated with impaired detection of social contingency, i.e., a reduced sensitivity to the other’s responsiveness to one’s own behavior. Surprisingly, our analysis reveals that, at least under the conditions of this highly simplified, computer-mediated, embodied form of social interaction, people with HFA perform equally well as controls. This finding supports the increasing use of virtual reality interfaces for helping people with ASD to better compensate for their social disabilities. Further dynamical analyses are necessary for a better understanding of the mechanisms that are leading to the somewhat surprising results here obtained.
Uploads
Papers by Kai Vogeley