Following report can be found in:

The Reasoner (Volume 4, Number 12 - December 2010 p.179-180)

Interacting Minds: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Social Cognition,

9 November 2010

Imagine you are stopped at a pedestrian crossing talking. A stranger steps out onto the road, and, without noticing the light is still red, you follow, only to be 179 struck by a car. Almost all of this happened to Jens Krause (Humboldt Universit¨at zu Berlin), amusingly enough at the end of a study to discover the conditions under which one individual crossing the road can trigger another to do the same; an example of collective decision making. At the interdisciplinary symposium “Interacting Minds” organized by the Centre of Integrative Life Sciences, Krause demonstrated how an apparently informed individual can take the lead of entire groups by following 3 surprisingly simple rules specifying how to move in relation to conspecifics.
According to Hanne de Jaegher (University of the Basque Country) these group behaviours may meet only some of the criteria for social cognition. Whilst the individuals are clearly ‘coupled’, are they ‘mutually regulating’? In this case no, the stranger may not even notice you following them, there would be no eect of your action on their mind. For de Jaegher this additional criterion, mutual regulation, is needed as it allows for interactions to be understood as potentially constitutive of social cognition. Some may reject an extended metaphysics of cognition and still accept the claim that the study of social cognition can move beyond the study of reactions to social stimuli and focus on interaction proper.
In line with rules modelling collective decision making, Giorgia Committeri (Gabriele d’Annunzio University) argues that many forms of social interaction are dependent on an individual’s capacity to represent the space in which they and their fellows are located. With this Committeri takes us away from the interaction itself, back into the individual agents and their representations of space. Committeri divides space into reachable and non-reachable space and finds that not only the space around the individual, but also the space around others is also represented in this way. This raises an interesting possibility that our representations of others involve not only representing their mental states but basic facts of their embodied agency.
Natalie Sebanz (Radboud University) makes great strides toward understanding this with a focus on what she calls ‘shared action representations’, which represent both one’s own and one’s partner’s contributions to an action. This class of representation may contribute strongly to explanations of how we cognise and perform actions involving more than one agent. In particular that shared representations are predictive will contribute significantly to explanations of real time coordination.
Excitingly, Marcel Brass provides evidence for a role of this kind of representation in social cognition beyond joint action. Those with suering autism have severe diffculties with social cognition. Whilst they appear to have no problems in forming shared representations there is evidence of a specific diffculty in controlling their use.

Tania Singer’s (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences) work also contributes to deeper understanding of what we need to represent about others to be successful social cognisers. Her focus being on what we represent about other’s emotional states and in particular what is shared in empathy. Empathy, Singer suggests, involves two important forms of representation, the representation of an emotional state, but also a bodily self-representation, which is used to identify the origin of the emotion as either one’s own or another’s.
Wayne Christensen (Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research) oers an account of moral cognition that allows for the subject’s lack of insight into their moral thinking whilst preserving the rationality of moral claims. He suggests reconceiving of individuals as moral expert and imports insights from expertise research to explain moral cognition. In particular ‘situation models’ which have very rich and detailed content, but which are highly organised allowing for fast responses.

Even from very basic interactions between agents, important insights into social cognition have been generated. Most of the workshop focused on what an individual needs to represent and how this is done in order to successfully engage in a social interaction. However, we also saw a need to push outside of individual agents to the metaphysics of interaction itself. This took us from a group decision to cross a road to the capacity for skilled moral decision making. Many thanks to all our speakers and participants!