TY - JOUR

T1 - Putting the nonsocial into social neuroscience: A role for domain-general priority maps during social interactions

AU - Ramsey, Richard

AU - Ward, Robert

PY - 2020/7/1

Y1 - 2020/7/1

N2 - Whether on a first date or during a team briefing at work, people’s daily lives are inundated with social information, and in recent years, researchers have begun studying the neural mechanisms that support social-information processing. We argue that the focus of social neuroscience research to date has been skewed toward specialized processes at the expense of general processing mechanisms with a consequence that unrealistic expectations have been set for what specialized processes alone can achieve. We propose that for social neuroscience to develop into a more mature research program, it needs to embrace hybrid models that integrate specialized person representations with domain-general solutions, such as prioritization and selection, which operate across all classes of information (both social and nonsocial). To illustrate our central arguments, we first describe and then evaluate a hybrid model of information processing during social interactions that (a) generates novel and falsifiable predictions compared with existing models; (b) is predicated on a wealth of neurobiological evidence spanning many decades, methods, and species; (c) requires a superior standard of evidence to substantiate domain-specific mechanisms of social behavior; and (d) transforms expectations of what types of neural mechanisms may contribute to social-information processing in both typical and atypical populations.

AB - Whether on a first date or during a team briefing at work, people’s daily lives are inundated with social information, and in recent years, researchers have begun studying the neural mechanisms that support social-information processing. We argue that the focus of social neuroscience research to date has been skewed toward specialized processes at the expense of general processing mechanisms with a consequence that unrealistic expectations have been set for what specialized processes alone can achieve. We propose that for social neuroscience to develop into a more mature research program, it needs to embrace hybrid models that integrate specialized person representations with domain-general solutions, such as prioritization and selection, which operate across all classes of information (both social and nonsocial). To illustrate our central arguments, we first describe and then evaluate a hybrid model of information processing during social interactions that (a) generates novel and falsifiable predictions compared with existing models; (b) is predicated on a wealth of neurobiological evidence spanning many decades, methods, and species; (c) requires a superior standard of evidence to substantiate domain-specific mechanisms of social behavior; and (d) transforms expectations of what types of neural mechanisms may contribute to social-information processing in both typical and atypical populations.

KW - social neuroscience

KW - social cognition

KW - person perception

KW - domain specificity

KW - priority maps

KW - biased competition

U2 - https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1745691620904972

DO - https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1745691620904972

M3 - Article

VL - 15

SP - 1076

EP - 1094

JO - Perspectives on Psychological Science

JF - Perspectives on Psychological Science

SN - 1745-6916

IS - 4

ER -