Putting the Nonsocial Into Social Neuroscience: A Role for Domain-General Priority Maps During Social Interactions. (July 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ramsey, Richard; Ward, Rob
• Is Part Of: Perspectives on psychological science. Volume 15:Number 4(2020)
• Page Start: 1076
• Page End: 1094
• Publication Date: 2020-07
• Subjects: social neuroscience -- social cognition -- person perception -- domain specificity -- priority maps -- biased competition; Psychology -- Periodicals; 150
• DOI: 10.1177/1745691620904972
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1745-6916

Abstract

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.