PSYC 205 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Mirror Neuron, Premotor Cortex, Extrastriate Body Area
28 Sep 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Challenge of living within a group: keeping track of the relative social rank of others and yourself. Most animal species live in social groups and social living results in particular cognitive challenges that must be overcome in order to interact effectively. Recognizing conspecifics, predators, and prey is critical for adaptive behaviour. Important for the differentiation of animate, biological entities from inanimate objects in the environment: biological motion and face perception o. Likely other important characteristics that human and animals use to categorize the animate from the inanimate world o. Focus on these two b/c of their connections with social cognition. Offers information to the adult human observer: species classification, gender, attractiveness, and emotion from how something moves. Humans do so even when the motion is shown in simple point-light displays created by depicting the movement of individual joints with single lights, effectively producing an animation of movement o.
