Alle Publikationen
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2016
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(2016): Pluralism, social cognition, and interaction in autism. In: Philosophical Psychology 30 (1-2), S. 161-184. DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2016.1261394
Abstract: In this paper, I investigate social cognition and its relation to interaction in autism from the perspective of a pluralist account of social understanding by considering behavioral as well as neuroscientific findings. Traditionally, researchers have focused on mental state reasoning in autism, which is uncontroversially impaired. A pluralist account of social cognition aims to explore the varieties of social understanding that are acquired throughout ontogeny and may play a role in everyday life. The analysis shows that children with autism are well able to understand other people's behavior by considering social rules and norms, scripts, and stereotypes. Moreover, some individuals with autism succeed in understanding other people's behavior in terms of mental states by employing explicit behavioral rules as a compensatory strategy. The paper ends with a discussion of the social cognitive (dys)functions in autism and their relation to the motivation of individuals with autism to engage in social interaction.
Keywords: Angesicht, ASPERGER-SYNDROME, Autism spectrum disorder, Beeinflussung sozial angemessenen Verhaltens, Blick, Disziplin, EYE GAZE, FALSE BELIEF, Interaction, Interaktion, JOINT ATTENTION, mental states, mental states reasoning, mentale Zustände, MIRROR-NEURON SYSTEM, NORMAL-CHILDREN, Observablen/Kriterien für sozial angemessenes Verhalten und dessen Bewertung, OF-MIND DEVELOPMENT, OTHERS ACTIONS, Pathologie, PERSPECTIVE-TAKING, Philosophie, pluralist theories, Psychologie, script, Social Cognition, soziale Kognition, SPECTRUM DISORDERS 2015
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(2015): An Information-Based Approach to Consciousness. Mental State Decoding. DOI: 10.15502/9783958570276
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15502/9783958570276 Abstract: The debate on the neural correlates of visual consciousness often focuses on the question of which additional processing has to happen for a visual representation to enter consciousness. However, a related question that has only rarely been addressed is which brain regions directly encode specific contents of consciousness. The search for these core neural correlates of contents of consciousness (NCCCs) requires establishing a mapping between sensory experiences and population measures of brain activity in specific brain regions. One approach for establishing this mapping is multivariate decoding. Using this technique, several properties of NCCCs have been investigated. Masking studies have revealed that information about sensory stimuli can be decoded from the primary visual cortex, even if the stimuli cannot be consciously identified by a subject. This suggests that information that does not reach awareness can be encapsulated in early visual stages of processing. Visual imagery representations and veridical perception share similar neural representations in higher-level visual regions, suggesting that these regions are directly related to the encoding of conscious visual experience. But population signals in these higher-level visual regions cannot be the sole carriers of visual experiences because they are invariant to low-level visual features. We found no evidence for increased encoding of sensory information in the prefrontal cortex when a stimulus reaches awareness. In general, we found no role of the prefrontal cortex in encoding sensory experiences at all. However, the improved discrimination of sensory information during perceptual learning could be explained by an improved read-out by the prefrontal cortex. One possible implication is that prefrontal cortical regions do not participate in the encoding of sensory features per se. Instead they may be relevant in making decisions about sensory features, without exhibiting a re-representation of sensory information.
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