No animal is an island, entire of itself. With the exception of the last living dodo, any animal lives in a world where there are others like itself — members of its own species, with which it might cooperate or compete, and the only group from which it can find an effective breeding partner. Conspecifics are a distinct and important part of an animal’s environment, even if it is not a member o...

Social behavior is ordinarily treated as being under conscious (if not always thoughtful) control. Howmer, considerable evidence now supports the view that social behavior often operates in an implicit or unconscious fashion. The identifying feature of implicit cognition is that past experience influences judgment in a fashion not introspectively known by the actor. The present conclusionthat a...

In this talk, I extend the enactive approach to cognition to the social domain within a larger framework of varieties of intentionality and argue for a second-person approach to understanding others, emphasizing a difference in our understanding of others depending on whether we are directly engaged with them in interaction or merely observing them. The enactive account is especially persuasive...

Social cognition refers to the mental representations and processes that underlie social judgments and behavior—for example, the application of stereotypes to members of social groups. Theories of social cognition have generally assumed that mental representations are abstract and stable and that theyareactivatedandapplied by relatively automatic, context-independent processes. Recent evidence ...

Antisocial behaviours and psychopathic traits place an individual at risk for criminality, mental illness, substance dependence, and psychosocial dysfunction. Social cognition deficits appear to be associated with psychopathic traits and are believed to contribute to interpersonal dysfunction. Most research investigating the relationship of these traits with social cognition has been conducted ...

Face perception provides information critical to cognitive computations about the social world. This raises the possibility that the development of mechanisms used for social cognition may depend on the presence of normal face perception mechanisms, and this notion partly motivates an aetiological model of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that suggests that deficits in face perception lead to the...