Please cite this article in press as: Seyfart j.anbehav.2015.01.030 The social intelligence hypothesis argues that competition and cooperation among individuals have shaped the evolution of cognition in animals. What do we mean by social cognition? Here we suggest that the building blocks of social cognition are a suite of skills, ordered roughly according to the cognitive demands they place up...

How do people consider other minds during cooperation versus competition? Some accounts predict that theory of mind (ToM) is recruited more for cooperation versus competition or competition versus cooperation, whereas other accounts predict similar recruitment across these two contexts. The present fMRI study examined activity in brain regions for ToM (bilateral temporoparietal junction, precun...

The cultural cognition thesis holds that individuals form risk perceptions that reflect their commitments to contested views of the good society. We conducted a study that used the dispute over mandatory HPV vaccination to test the cultural cognition thesis. Although public health officials have recommended that all girls aged 11 or 12 be vaccinated for HPV-a sexually transmitted virus that cau...

How do people consider other minds during cooperation versus competition? Some accounts predict that theory of mind (ToM) is recruited more for cooperation versus competition or competition versus cooperation, whereas other accounts predict similar recruitment across these two contexts. The present fMRI study examined activity in brain regions for ToM (bilateral temporoparietal junction, precun...

1. Criteria of Adequacy for a Theory of 'Theory of Mind' There is consensus in cognitive science that ordinary people are robust mindreaders and that mindreading begins early in life. Many other questions concerning mindreading, however, remain in dispute, including the four that follow: (1) By what method(s) do cognizers read other people’s minds -that is, attribute mental states to them? Whic...

The ability to reason about mental states is critical for predicting and interpreting people’s behavior and for communicating effectively. Yet both children and adults exhibit some remarkable limitations in reasoning about mental states. In this article, I outline some of the parallels between children’s and adults’ fallacies in reasoning about the mind and suggest that a fundamental bias in so...

BACKGROUND Residential status has been linked to numerous determinants of health and well-being. However, the influence of residential status on cognitive decline remains unclear. The purpose of this research was to assess the changes of cognitive function among older adults with different residential status (urban residents, rural-to-urban residents, rural residents, and urban-to-rural residen...

An emerging body of evidence from a number of fields is beginning to reveal general neural principles underlying cognition. The characteristic adaptability of cognitive function is seen to derive from large-scale networks in the cerebral cortex that are able to repeatedly change the state of coordination among their constituent areas on a subsecond time scale. Experimental and theoretical studi...

Sensory information processing and cognition in brains are modeled using dynamic systems theory. The brain's dynamic state is described by a trajectory evolving in a high-dimensional state space. We introduce a hierarchy of random cellular automata as the mathematical tools to describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of the cortex. The corresponding brain model is called neuropercolation which has...