HENRY

The 10th anniversary issue of the wonderful Trends in Cognitive Sciences has a collection of interesting papers.

First up is Uddin et al’s The self and social cognition: the role of cortical midline structures and mirror neurons, which reviews some of the recent work on mirror neurons and social cognition and concludes:

Self- and other- representations are crucial to social functioning. Although most animals can distinguish, on some level, the self from others, such separation is more refined in the non-human primates that possess self-recognition, self-awareness and basic theory-of-mind skills. The right frontoparietal (Mirror Neuron System) and the (system of cortical midline structures) seem to support these abilities, albeit in different ways. Here, we propose that the (Mirror Neuron System) enables physical other-to-self mapping, whereas the (midline structure system) underscores mental state and evaluative simulation.

This is followed by Tsuchiya and Adolphs who discuss the interaction between Emotion and consciousness:

Consciousness and emotion feature prominently in our personal lives, yet remain enigmatic. Recent advances prompt further distinctions that should provide more experimental traction: we argue that emotion consists of an emotion state (functional aspects, including emotional response) as well as feelings (the conscious experience of the emotion), and that consciousness consists of level (e.g. coma, vegetative state and wakefulness) and content (what it is we are conscious of). Not only is consciousness important to aspects of emotion but structures that are important for emotion, such as brainstem nuclei and midline cortices, overlap with structures that regulate the level of consciousness. The intersection of consciousness and emotion is ripe for experimental investigation, and we outline possible examples for future studies.

Next up is Kadosh and Henik’s Can synaesthesia research inform cognitive science?, which talks about what cognitive science might learn from synaesthesia.

Finally, there’s Universal moral grammar: theory, evidence and the future by John Mikhail, which describes the recent work by social psychologists to “describe the nature and origin of moral knowledge by using concepts and models similar to those used in Chomsky’s program in linguistics.”

Posted on March 29th, 2007 by Simon Greenhill