Date: 2005.12.13 (Tue) 11:00-15:00
Place: Informatics Education Building 4F, Conference Room
Time: 13:00-14:00
Speaker: Hirokata Fukushima
Title: Understanding other persons: Neural mechanism in human social cognition.
Keywords: Electroencephalogram (EEG) / Event-related potential (ERP), Social cognition, Human empathy

Affiliation: Department of General System Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Position: Graduate Student
Adviser: Kazuo Hiraki, Hiraki Lababoratory
Disciplines: Cognitive neuroscience, Functional brain measurement, Social cognition/psychology
Societies and Conferences: Japanese Cognitive Science Society, Japan Neuroscience Society, Japanese Psychonomic Society, Cognitive Neuroscience Society, International Conference on Cognitive Science

Bibliography: Hirokata Fukushima, Understanding other persons: Neural mechanism in human social cognition, Human Science Integration Seminar Abstracts, No. 13, pp. 2, 2005.
(Please use this bibliography when you cite this abstract.)

Abstract:
How does our brain understand another person's internal states such as intention, idea, or feeling? Neural mechanism related to such “social cognition” has increasingly examined in these 20 years. In the first half of this presentation, we overviewed a part of recent social neuroscience, with asking a naïve question; how is agency-related information, such as ‘self’ and ‘other’, represented in the brain. A concept of shared neural representation between self and other, and also a mechanism for self-other discrimination were reviewed and discussed. In the later half of the presentation, we showed a part of our own research, which is trying to approach an abstract and complex phenomenon of human empathy. We measured the neural activity of perceptions of another’s monetary gain and loss using electroencephalograms while individuals participated in a two-person gambling game. Frontal brain activities showed that female brains perceive another person's loss as negative, while male brains judge another’s loss as positive for themselves correlating with a social personality scale or subjective judgment of intimacy to the partner. We consider this neural pattern as a neuro-physiological index of social trait, and are examining it to reveal a relationship between self- and other-related processing in our brain.

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