Towards the Understanding of the Neurogenesis of Social Cognition: Evidence from Impaired Populations

One accepted and straightforward approach to understand the genesis of social cognition – as of any particular human neoformation – is to look for specific developmental disorders in the hope to find clear double dissociations. In this regard, contrasting subjects with autistic spectrum disorders on the one hand and subjects with Williams syndrome on the other has gained large acceptance. Subjects with autistic spectrum disorders have been interpreted as being impaired specifically in social cognition, while in WS subjects social cognition is interpreted to be spared. Detailed studies, however, indicate that the situation is by far not that simple and straightforward. The seemingly simple term “social cognition” covers several aspects from gaze contact through different facets of theory of mind ability to social inferencing in language pragmatics. In this paper a survey of the different tasks and results will be presented that all seem to challenge the simplicity of the implied “social cognition” module. Our own empirical data also indicate that (1) in individuals with autistic spectrum disorders theory of mind ability, as a central aspect of social cognition, shows a highly heterogeneous pattern, as manifested in their ability to understand written irony; and that (2) in WS subjects the unfolding of the social mind can be differentiated into more specific social skills, as manifested in various tasks related to pragmatics of word meaning acquisition.