Knowledge Clips Week 3: Understanding Others

These clips focus on empathy, simulation theory, and autism.

Empathy: the ability to read the mind of others.
→ In daily life, we consider it to be a good thing.
When we talk about empathy, we talk about hypotheses or inferences we make about the mind of others.
→ But how do we even know that others have a mind? We cannot be sure that other people have the same feelings, thoughts, etc., as we do.

- Philosophical zombie problem (David Chalmers)
Daniel Dennett: intentional stance
- Zero order intentionality: we look at things without assuming that there are intentions there. For example, when we look at a rock laying on the ground.
- First order: we assume that another person has a mind
- Second-order: we assume that another person is making assumptions about the mind of others
- Third-order: where you assume that another person is assuming about the mind of others.

Empathy: Two explanations
1. Theory-theory: formal cognitive knowledge about mental states and behavior.
- Inferences about goals or emotions
- Fairly spontaneous
- Stem from an understanding of the situation
- Probe recognition task: [link to the task]
→ Sally Anne task (theory of mind): putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. Really about cognitive empathy, about knowing what the other one knows
> If children are using a theory of mind, they will say that Sally is going to look in the basket (because that is where they think that Sally thinks the ball is). But if they cannot do that, and thus cannot distinguish between their own knowledge and the knowledge of another, they will say Sally is going to look in the box.

2. Simulation theory: we simulate what we perceive and experience mental states (of what the other person is feeling, believing, or intending to do).
- Empathy: useful for a doctor? → Doctors need to have empathy for their patients when talking to them, but for the doctors, it is also good to be able to switch the empathy off when they have to do surgery.
→ Experiment with empathy of pain: the patients watched an injection with a numb hand (not a painful condition) versus a real injection (painful condition). The participants had to rate the pain and unpleasantness of the pictures, while their brain activity was registered.
- The TPJ (temporal parietal junction): an important brain area involved in switching empathy on and off and an important area in taking different perspectives.

Simulation theory: we understand the emotions, behaviors, and intentions of others because we simulate what we see (De Waal & Preston).
→ Not only humans, but also other species have this simulating behavior.
Barrett (2017): core emotions/affect. We have a limited set of core emotions that we experience and can perceive in others.
→ Activation vs deactivation, and pleasant vs unpleasant are kind of the basic emotions. The others are dependent/constructed based on what kind of context we experience and perceive them in.
→ Simulation may be part of emotional contagion, but we need the bigger context to make sense of what another person feels. We cannot perceive/simulate a pure emotion and fully understand what is going on.

Experiment Mimicry (Cook et al., 2012):
→ Participants play rock, paper, and scissors blindfolded, at a chance level. One was blindfolded, the other was not. The idea was that the blindfolded person cannot be influenced by the behavior of the other. The not blindfolded person can, of course, be influenced by the gestures made by the blindfolded person.
- The question was: are indeed the gestures of the non-blindfolded person influenced by the gestures of the blindfolded person? (dark grey = rock, light grey = paper, white = scissor)
→ Mainly look at the two outer conditions. In the middle, the effects are a bit unclear. But overall you can say the opponent is influenced by the blindfolded player.
Stronger evidence for mimicking behavior comes from another experiment: a covert simulation demonstrated using motor-evoked potentials (MEP’s).
- Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over the primary motor cortex
- Electromyography (EMG) to pick up muscle movement
→ The idea is that if you're perceiving a certain movement in others, that there is a level of preactivation in the motor areas, so a stronger result of the magnetic pulse over the primary motor cortex, resulting in a stronger muscle response (picked up with the EMG).
Strafella & Paus (2000): specific actions (pre)activate specific muscles

Mirror neurons:
→ Same neurons for perception and (the execution of) action.
- Single cells in the motor area were active both when performing the action and looking at someone doing the action.
→ These cells were mainly found in area F5 (monkey brain), which corresponds with the premotor cortex in the human brain. But at the same time in the monkey brain, parietal regions were found to ‘host’ these particular neurons.
Umilta et al. (2001): mirror neuron activation is sensitive to goals
→ The monkeys saw a hand grasping an object, or saw a hand mimicking grasping an object (which was not there).
→ In another condition, they put a curtain in front of the object.
- So the question was, are the neurons more active when there is an object, so when there is a certain goal in the movement of the hand?
→ This was indeed the case:
See other page…
→ A and B do not differ very much. So when the monkey either sees the hand grasping an object, or the monkey knows that the hand is grasping an object, it does not differ much from each other in the activity of the mirror neurons.
→ In C and D the activity is almost/fully absent.
So this is clear evidence that mirror neurons respond to not only the movements but that it is also related to the meaning and the goal of the movement.

But what about mirror neurons in humans?
- No or few single cell recordings. Simply because experimenting with that is not ethical.
- But there are suggestions coming from research with fMRI, saying that the mirror neurons are present in the inferior frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobe.
Study of single-neuron recordings in which they found some evidence for the mirror neurons in specific parts of the human brain:
- The hippocampus
- Somatosensory motor area
- Entorhinal cortex
- Parahippocampal gyrus

Autism: do they have broken mirror neurons?
→ They cannot simulate what they perceive in others, so cannot understand what another person is doing, why he/she is doing that, etc.
Oberman et al (2005): had children with and without autism watch videos of hands opening and closing. They looked at what happened in the EEG signal.
→ The idea is that control children would show Mu suppression when they perceive another hand opening or closing. Which is a sign of them indeed mimicking internally the movement of the hand.
→ This Mu suppression was not found in the experimental condition of children with autism.
Hamilton, Brindley, Frith (2007): looked at children with ASD compared to healthy children.
→ They found that the children with ASD didn’t have an impaired imitation.
→ But the ASD children were significantly worse in the theory of mind task (like Sally Anne task