An intensive three-week course will give advanced students a “deep end” introduction to the problem of intelligence – how the brain produces intelligent behavior and how we may be able to replicate intelligence in machines.
Social intelligence is a core element of human intelligence. These lectures introduce many of the experimental methods used to study the development of social cognition and provide an overview of aspects of our current understanding of the development of social intelligence in infants and young children, such as their ability to recognize faces and their social categories, reason about social interactions, and infer the mental states of others.
Topics: Theory of Mind (ToM): false belief task embodies a difference between reality and what a character thinks; 5 year olds can do false belief tasks while 3 year olds cannot; fMRI study reveals regions selectively involved in reasoning about mental states, in right/left temporal parietal junction, medial prefrontal cortex, and posterior cingulate; decoding features of ToM, e.g. what is the population code of neurons (voxels) that encode information about mental states; test case: morally relevant thoughts, e.g. distinguishing stories with very similar events but differing moral blame; scale from accidental vs. intentional harm is correlated with RTPJ activity; information about justification and source of information (e.g. visual vs. auditory) also encoded in RTPJ activity
Topics: Beyond vision: action, navigation, social perception and behavior; correlation of brain size and social group size; Dennett’s three levels for predicting behavior: physical stance, design stance, intentional stance (to understand other minds - values, beliefs, desires); study of social intelligence by identifying complex social interactions that are shared with animals and represented in similar brain structures; examples of social interactions in animals: Battle at Kruger (story with complex social aspects played out by animals), revenge, teasing, play, Meerkat behaviors; Nalini Ambady: few seconds of silent video reveal rich social information; factors underlying facial attractiveness
Topics: Infant studies reveal non-verbal building blocks for social perception; looking time methods: preferential looking (what/who is more interesting/pleasing), (de)habituation (what/who is similar), violation of expected looking (what is surprising), anticipatory looking (what will happen next); infants’ ability to recognize faces and social categories (e.g. gender, race, attractiveness, language) and visual cues used to make these distinctions; infants’ expectations of imitation among groups (members of social groups act alike); active preference measures, such as whether infants prefer helpers or hinderers, and what visual cues contribute to this preference; with regard to individual actions, infants appear to use an inverse planning model to interpret actions, and a similar strategy may be used to reason about social interaction
