Toward a second-person neuroscience.

TL;DR: Evidence from neuroimaging, psychophysiological studies, and related fields are reviewed to argue for the development of a second-person neuroscience, which will help neuroscience to really “go social” and may also be relevant for the understanding of psychiatric disorders construed as disorders of social cognition.

Abstract: In spite of the remarkable progress made in the burgeoning field of social neuroscience, the neural mechanisms that underlie social encounters are only beginning to be studied and could-paradoxically-be seen as representing the "dark matter" of social neuroscience. Recent conceptual and empirical developments consistently indicate the need for investigations that allow the study of real-time social encounters in a truly interactive manner. This suggestion is based on the premise that social cognition is fundamentally different when we are in interaction with others rather than merely observing them. In this article, we outline the theoretical conception of a second-person approach to other minds and review evidence from neuroimaging, psychophysiological studies, and related fields to argue for the development of a second-person neuroscience, which will help neuroscience to really "go social"; this may also be relevant for our understanding of psychiatric disorders construed as disorders of social cognition.

Summary

1. Introduction

• The latter has been seen as providing evidence for a “Theory Theory” account of social cognition believe to give us an inferential, reflective (and what might be called a ‘third-person’) grasp of others’ mental states (Frith & Frith 2006, 2010).
• After more than a decade of research, the neural mechanisms underlying social interaction have remained elusive and could —paradoxically— be seen as representing the ‘dark matter’1 of social 1.
• In sensu strictu, the term dark matter is used in physics and astronomy to describe matter, which is inferred to exist, but which has not been directly observed and may not even be observable.

1.1 Spectator Theories of Other Minds

• Spectatorial accounts of social knowing are not restricted to social neuroscience, but have been central to the Western intellectual tradition (Dewey 1950).
• Psychological accounts of how people make sense of other people have usually shared a common format: Each is a detached observer, rather than actively engaged with the other in some joint project.
• According to the textbooks, psychologists in their research necessarily start from the observation of inherently meaningless, “colorless behavior” (Hull 1943, p.25) and can only begin to make psychological sense of what they observe on the basis of theorizing.
• This is not the case for “Theory Theory” of Mind (TToM) in its original form, for, according to TToM, it is only once children have developed a “Theory of Mind” that they have access to any of the necessary psychological data upon which the theory could be based.

1.2 An alternative account of social knowing

• This approach drew upon Gestalt theory and phenomenology.
• Here is Solomon Asch's lucid statement of this position:.
• The authors will be arguing for an approach to social knowing based on interaction and emotional engagements between people, rather than mere observation.
• Also, preliminary evidence from neuroimaging and psychophysiological studies demonstrates profound differences in neural processing related to the reciprocity of social interaction, which is consistent with their proposal that the second-person approach can make an important contribution to the neuroscientific study of social encounters and could, in fact, lead to the development of a secondperson neuroscience (Section 3).

2.1 Overcoming the Spectatorial Gap

• Spectatorial views of cognition have been developed within the paradigm of standard cognitive science, which understands cognition as information processing in the sense of a passive intake of information provided by a ready-made world.
• Embodied cognition replaces this view by a concept in which perception is seen as an active process executed by an organism situated in the environment the subjects of which are not isolated from but embedded and coupled in the perceived world (Thompson 2007).
• Their account also stresses the importance of interaction dynamics, which may be seen as emergent properties of an interaction, and possible inter-brain effects of social interaction (see section 2.3 & 3.2.2 for details).
• Abbreviations: R: (re-) actions performed by agents.
• In line with recent meta-analyses of functional neuroimaging studies, which have investigated mentalizing, the authors see medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and the posterior cingulate cortex (PPC) as the most important nodes of this network, sometimes also referred to as the “cortical midline structures” (e.g. Northoff & Bermpohl 2004; Schilbach et al. in press; Uddin et al. 2007).

2.1.1 Constituents of a second-person approach: Emotional engagement

• A second-person grasp of other minds, the authors argue, is, first, closely related to feelings of engagement and emotional responses to the other.
• According to this viewpoint, awareness of other minds crucially hinges upon emotional engagement and a responsiveness to another person’s states or actions as compared to a detached observer’s attitude, which does not include such responding .
• On a neural level, emotional and embodied responses may play a crucial role in influencing action control networks of the brain by modulating processes of sensorimotor integration, which, in turn, solicit activity and observable behavior .
• It would seem plausible that emotional-embodied responses could facilitate more cognitive ways of understanding minds, while the absence of such responses could make this a more effortful process.
• Furthermore, it is important to point out that while emotional engagement may also occur (and could be particularly relevant) during observation , the opposite may be true for some situations, in which one actually interacts with someone .

2.1.2. Constituents of a second-person approach: Social interaction

• Social interactions are characterized by intricate reciprocal relations with the perception of socially relevant information prompting (re-) actions, which are themselves processed and reacted to .
• Being in interaction with someone, the authors suggest, furthermore relies upon a perception of the environment in terms of the resources held collectively by both interactors rather than those held by each individual alone (Costall 1995; Sebanz et al.
• In social interaction rather than exercising one’s deliberative reflective capacities the authors exercise their own practical know-how in dealing with others as interactors (Klin et al. 2003).
• Here, interaction and feedback are not only a way of gathering data about the other person, i.e. observing effects one may have on the other, but rather, as De Jaegher et al. (2010) have argued persuasively, one’s knowledge of the other resides —at least in part— in the interaction dynamics ‘between’ the agents.

2.2.1 Developing awareness of minds through second-person engagements: Evidence from

• Developmental psychology Debates in developmental psychology concerned with the processes through which infants and young children come to recognize the existence and nature of other minds reflect the same assumptions that have beset the traditional philosophical debates.
• Probably the most impressive evidence of infants’ sensitivity to and preference for the infant-directedness of interpersonal actions comes from recent studies concerning early responses to gaze.
• This preference reveals itself both in terms of longer looking times and in terms of more frequent looks (Farroni et al. 2002).
• The authors argue that such experiences of mind and mentality are first and most intensely experienced within secondperson engagements, where the individual is directly addressed by and responds to an ‘other’ mind.

2.2.2 Knowing Minds in Interaction: Evidence from social and cognitive psychology

• In social psychology and related fields —in spite of a long history and interest in “social presence” effects (e.g. Allport 1924; Biocca et al.
• The role of social interaction for cognitive and social development has begun to gain centre stage in various scientific discourses (De Jaegher et al. 2010): However, participants' interaction dynamics allow us to distinguish not only between fixed and moving objects, but also between the moving object and the other's cursor (Auvray et al. 2009).
• It is only in this interactive process that contingencies are simultaneously experienced and acted upon.
• The authors suggest that the approach promises to do the same within the field of social neuroscience, thereby leading to the establishment of a second-person neuroscience.

3. Toward a second-person neuroscience

• After more than a decade of successful research, ‘dark matter’ remains in the field of social neuroscience .
• As highlighted above previous research has often focused on the perception of inert stimuli —consistent with the idea of a detached observer— whereas, in everyday life, making sense of others requires both emotional engagement and interaction .
• In the following the authors will review evidence from neuroimaging and psychophysiology to demonstrate the relevance and applicability of the first and second dimension of their conception of a second-person grasp of other minds (section 3.1).
• From their perspective, making experimental paradigms more interactive and ecologically valid will allow assessing differences in the neural correlates of social cognition from an observer’s as compared to from an interactor’s point of view in an individual’s brain .
• Cube [2] represents studies which use paradigms that allow the participant to directly influence the stimulus material, i.e. seeing the effect of her actions (e.g. interactive eyetracking studies; see section 3.1.2).

3.1.1 Being Addressed as You: The neurobiological correlates of emotional engagement

• Apart from this traditional view of how emotions might contribute to social cognition, their account views emotional responses not only as a way of perceiving emotional states in others, but also as a way of being engaged with others, which could contribute to the understanding of the bodily intentionality of the other in terms of bodily responsiveness (Rietveld 2008).
• These brain regions are commonly described as important nodes of the MNS, which has been related to understanding the intentions that underlie others’ actions (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia 2010).

3.1.2 Minds made for sharing: The neurobiological correlates of the reciprocity of social

• As outlined above, interaction loops must be considered as important constituents of secondperson relations.
• Also, the setup allows us to investigate phenomena whose emergence necessarily depends upon social interaction, its reciprocity and whose underlying psychological processes and neural mechanisms may differ depending upon the roles interactors hold during interaction, namely those of being ‘initiator’ or ‘responder’ in the interaction.
• Based on the hypothesis that differences in the neural basis of joint attention could be related to the reciprocity of social interaction (as compared to previous social neuroscience attempts to investigate the neural correlates of joint attention by means of tasks in which participants are mere observers of gaze cues (e.g. Williams et al.
• In spite of participants always fixating an object on the stimulus screen, the underlying brain activity appears to be markedly different depending upon whether or not the participant is doing this ‘together’ with a virtual other or not.

3.2.1 Top-down and bottom-up investigations of social interaction

• In the joint attention paradigm, participants interact with anthropomorphic virtual characters, who they believe are controlled by other human participants (Wilms et al. 2010).
• Furthermore, paradigms are being developed in their laboratory, which will help to understand differences between social cognition from an interactor’s as compared to an observer’s point of view with respect to reward-based interactions (cf. Pessoa & Engelmann 2010).
• Another extension of the above described joint attention paradigm could consist in using virtual characters whose facial expressions and whole-body movements could also be manipulated.
• Furthermore one can address the question of the congruency of the behavior shown by the virtual character during the interaction, i.e. whether following or not following the participant’s gaze has an impact on ratings of sympathy and trustworthiness as well as subsequently evoked prosocial behavior shown towards the person one has interacted with.

3.2.2 From interaction loops to interaction dynamics

• In the early years of social neuroscience attempts had already been made to investigate two brains in interaction through “hyperscanning”, hailed as a break-through technology, (Montague et al. 2002).
• At least in part this is due to the fact that using it to its full potential would have required establishing more ecologically valid ways for two or more participants to interact (cf. Redcay et al. 2010).
• Using these technologies in such an interactive paradigm, Bente et al. (2007, 2008b) used motion capture devices, data gloves and eyetracking devices to capture the nonverbal behavior of two interlocutors and transmit this information in real time to the partner’s screen where it was executed by an animated character.
• This kind of "blended interaction" allows for most realistic and lively displays of interaction while exerting strict experimental control over the specific cues under investigation.

4. Key Topics & Objectives for Future Research

• The characterization of differences between social cognition from an interactor’s as compared to from an observer’s point of view, the differential recruitment of underlying processes and neural mechanisms and the investigation of interacting individuals appear as key targets of a secondperson neuroscience .
• Here, developing approaches for data collection and analysis from two interacting persons (and possibly two brains) is relevant, as is re-visiting and modifying established experimental paradigms to incorporate an emotionally engaged, interactive perspective (see section 2).
• Overall, the next section, therefore, serves to consider potential new avenues that research might take by embracing a second-person approach.
• Other applications of the method could include investigations of how interactive gaze cues shown by a virtual character impact on object-related decision-making or memory performance.
• Apart from asking which processes and tendencies might be primed or enhanced by social interaction, it will also be important to investigate which cognitive capacities might be perturbed or which processes are interfered with during social interaction.

4.2.1 From implicit interaction to explicit mentalizing?

• In establishing the relationship between social cognition from an interactor’s as compared to an observer’s point of view, the question of implicit and explicit processes in social cognition gains further importance.
• It is never spelled out whether “implicit social cognition” is just what the authors reason consciously about, minus awareness or, if this is not the case, how exactly the former relates to the latter.
• Furthermore, a characterization of the neural signature of mutual and joint attention in infancy could be related to the development and neural bases of other social cognitive abilities, which develop later in life to investigate commonalities and differences in a longitudinal setup.
• Such an approach could help to directly test whether interaction-based network modulations are later co-opted and re-used for higher-order, explicit processes.

4.2.2 From mentalizing and mirroring to automatic interaction?

• Instead, the authors interact and ‘go with the flow’, all the while retaining the capacity to reflect upon their interlocutor and ourselves afterwards.
• First, they involve an automatic inference component based on previously acquired knowledge, which is also present during observation, and which is largely impervious to explicit modification.
• Thus, one empirically verifiable possibility would be that, at least in HFA, both low-level and high-level processes are relatively intact, but that the application of this implicit know-how versus explicit knowledge is disturbed, in that persons with HFA apply explicit, high-level TToM in situations where healthy controls ‘trust a gut feeling’.

4.2.3 Motivation and the spark to interaction: Putting reward signals into social cognition

• Another important feat will be to address how motivation- and reward-related signals could be differentially engaged during participation in social situations as compared to observation of others’ interaction and might interact with brain regions relevant for action control .
• These results offer important insights into what renders the experience of an interaction truly social: Humans appear to have a default expectation of reciprocation as evidenced by the naïve condition, which can be influenced drastically by the presumed disposition of an interactor to cooperate or compete.
• The use of the Turing test paradigm for neuroimaging purposes is likely to advance their understanding of the neural bases of social interaction:.
• Furthermore, it will be interesting to investigate whether changes in activity of the brain’s reward system in response to positively contingent gazereactions could generalize to contingent reactions irrespective of their valence depending on the situational context.
• Recent evidence suggests that different reward types recruit the reward system of the brain, which has given rise to the suggestion of a ‘common neural currency’ for rewards (Izuma et al. 2008).

4.3.1 Computational social neuroscience

• While computational neuroimaging studies inspired by game theory and others, which use generative models for data analyses, have already taken up the investigation of competitive scenarios and are beginning to address cooperative games (e.g. Yoshida et al. 2008), human beings’ unparalleled abilities for cooperation in real-time social interaction have largely been left unexplored.
• Similarly, recent findings from model-based neuroimaging studies already do provide evidence for differences in the neural mechanisms of experienced as compared to observational learning (activity changes in ventral striatum being selective to instrumental actions; Cooper et al., in press).
• One example of how a computational social neuroscience paradigm may help to assess and quantify the impact of (gaze-based) social interactions is the following:.
• In light of their hypothesis and preliminary findings, which suggest that social interactions may prompt collaborative motives, the authors expect that congruent gaze behavior exhibited by the virtual character in their joint attention manipulation may promote cooperative behavior in the ‘stag hunt’ game, while gaze aversion of the virtual character may have the opposite effect.
• The meaningful use of conversational agents, i.e. completely computer generated artificial social entities, in interaction studies, in contrast to avatars would require the implementation of basic social skills in the agents, serving the perception, processing and production of interactive behavior (see Vogeley & Bente 2010).

4.3.2 Genotype-specific effects and hormonal influences of the neural basis of social interaction

• Recent evidence suggests that important hormonal influences exist, which can specifically affect social behavior and its underlying neuroanatomical and neurofunctional correlates (e.g. Chura et al.
• Interestingly, it has been suggested that certain hormonal responses only occur in ecologically valid situations (e.g. Henckens et al. 2009), which is consistent with the assumptions of the here proposed second-person approach.
• Therefore, it seems likely that using the types of interactive and ecologically valid paradigms endorsed by the second-person account may also help to advance the investigation of the complex interplay and influence of hormones on the ‘social brain’.
• In addition, efforts are also being undertaken to understand genotype-specific differences in prosocial hormones and brain anatomy and how they impact on social behavior (e.g. Tost et al. 2010; Chen & Johnson, in press).
• Furthermore, the authors see great potential in elucidating how such genotype-specific differences might be related to differences in reward-based processing (e.g. Chakrabarti & Baron-Cohen 2011) and could predict differential responses to pharmacological challenges or therapeutic interventions.

5.2.1 The impact of social gaze on action control and interpersonal coordination in high-

• Functioning autism Autism is characterized by qualitative impairments of social interaction and communication.
• Individuals with HFA are neither impaired in explicit social cognition —as they, in fact, consciously remind themselves to think about the mental states of others in an attempt to compensate for interaction difficulties— nor in their capacity of implicit learning in general (Brown et al. 2010).
• Being in the presence of someone else (even a virtual other) may change their perception of the environment towards perceiving it in terms of the resources or possibilities for actions held collectively (“we-space”), rather than individually (e.g. Krueger 2010), also known as In other words.

5.2.2 Language use in high-functioning autism

• Furthermore, this ‘grounding’ view of language suggests that words do not contain their meaning, but that linguistic labels can be highly negotiable and that interlocutors flexibly seek to understand them against the background of a ‘common ground’ (Clark 1996).
• To this end interlocutors produce and monitor paralinguistic cues and one another’s instrumental behavior to ensure they, indeed, understand each other.
• The language in high-functioning autism is characterized by pragmatic and semantic deficits with patients being less likely to integrate contextual information (Groen et al. 2010).
• Consistently, patients seem to have particular difficulties in adapting to the changes in linguistic labels in reference to an immediately given social context (Nadig et al. 2009).
• Patients commonly describe difficulties in maintaining telephone conversations due to the fact that they find it nearly impossible to know when to speak in the absence of visual cues.

5.2.3 Meeting the interaction requirements of patients with high-functioning autism

• From a clinical perspective, individual reports of patients with HFA from their outpatient clinic are also noteworthy, in that patients describe not having any significant impairments of social interaction and communication when they interact with other persons diagnosed with HFA, which stands in striking opposition to the difficulties, which systematically occur when they interact with persons without this diagnosis.
• While also raising issues about the normative aspects of psychiatric diagnoses, these anecdotal reports emphasize that successful interaction and communication are crucially a matter of interpersonal adjustments and an awareness of the interactional requirements of another person.
• This is especially crucial for the case of HFA:.
• As the authors are normally not aware of their intuitive, nonverbal capacities that are automatic in nature, they do not even have the chance to take notice of the specific deficits in the communicative behavior of HFA patients.
• With respect to the focus of this paper, namely the scientific investigation of realtime social interactions, it seems most interesting to contrast dyads of neurotypical persons with neurotypical-patient and patient-patient dyads.

6. Concluding remarks

• In this article the authors have argued for the conception of a second-person approach to other minds suggesting that interpersonal understanding is primarily a matter of social interaction and emotional engagement with others.
• Such developments will not only help neuroscience to really go social, but may also be relevant for their understanding of psychiatric disorders construed as disorders of social cognition.
• The use of ecologically valid paradigms to probe social cognition, the authors suggest, will help to elucidate their putatively complementary roles as a function of the pragmatic requirements of social interaction and may also help to understand how activity might be shaped by the dynamics and ‘history’ of an ongoing interaction.
• Here, the interaction of gaze and other action-related cues will be of paramount importance.

Figures

Figure 4. A) Screenshot depicting an anthropomorphic virtual character and three objects (grey squares). B) Neural correlates of main effect of joint attention. C) Neural correlates of non-joint attention. D) Neural correlates of other-initiated joint attention. E) Neural correlates of self-initiated joint attention. Activation overlays based on a reanalysis of data taken from: Schilbach et al. (2010a).

Figure 6. Basic version of an avatar-based interaction platform (screen shot during calibration; virtual

Figure 2. Depiction of the experimental ‘landscape’ of a second-person neuroscience.

Figure 5. Illustration of the combined hyperscanning & dual eyetracking setup used by Saito and colleagues (Taken from: Saito et al. 2010).

Figure 3. A) Virtual scenario as shown in the instructions. B) Self-directed, socially relevant facial expression. C) Other-directed, arbitrary facial movement. D) Neural correlates of the perception of selfdirected facial expressions. E) Neural correlates of the perception of other-directed facial expressions. F) Neural correlates of the perception of arbitrary facial movements. Activation overlays based on reanalysis of data taken from: Schilbach et al. (2006).

Full text

1
To be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (in press)
© Cambridge University Press 2012
Below is an unedited, uncorrected BBS Target Article recently accepted for publication. This preprint has
been prepared specifically for potential commentators who wish to nominate themselves for formal
commentary invitation via Editorial Manager: http://bbs.edmgr.com/. The Commentary Proposal
Instructions can be accessed here: http://journals.cambridge.org/BBSJournal/Inst/Call
Please DO NOT write a commentary unless you receive a formal email invitation from the editors. If you
are invited to submit a commentary, a copyedited, corrected version of this paper will be made available.
Toward a second-person neuroscience
Leonhard Schilbach
Bert Timmermans
Vasudevi Reddy
Alan Costall
Gary Bente
Tobias Schlicht
Kai Vogeley
Corresponding author: Leonhard Schilbach, leonhard.schilbach@nf.mpg.de
Max-Planck-Institute for Neurological Research, Cologne, Germany
Abstract: In spite of the remarkable progress made in the burgeoning field of social
neuroscience, the neural mechanisms that underlie social encounters are only beginning to be
studied and could —paradoxically— be seen as representing the ‘dark matter’ of social
neuroscience. Recent conceptual and empirical developments consistently indicate the need for
investigations, which allow the study of real-time social encounters in a truly interactive manner.
This suggestion is based on the premise that social cognition is fundamentally different when we
are in interaction with others rather than merely observing them. In this article, we outline the
theoretical conception of a second-person approach to other minds and review evidence from
neuroimaging, psychophysiological studies and related fields to argue for the development of a
second-person neuroscience, which will help neuroscience to really go social; this may also be
relevant for our understanding of psychiatric disorders construed as disorders of social cognition.
Keywords: mentalizing network; mirror neuron system; social cognition from an interactor's
point of view; social cognition from an observer's point of view; 'problem' of other minds;
second-person neuroscience

2
“No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such thing physically possible, than that one
should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.”
William James (1890), The Principles of Psychology.
1. Introduction
The burgeoning field of social neuroscience has begun to illuminate the complex biological bases
of human social cognitive abilities (Frith & Frith 2010; Ochsner & Lieberman 2001). Many
investigations have focused, in particular, on the neural correlates of our capacity to grasp the
mental states of others. Two neuroanatomically distinct large-scale networks have gained center
stage as the neural substrates of social cognition: the so-called “mirror neuron system” (MNS)
and the “mentalizing network” (MENT). The former has been taken as evidence for a
simulationist account of social cognition and is believed to give us a “first-person grasp” of the
motor goals and intentions of other individuals (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia 2010). The latter has
been seen as providing evidence for a “Theory Theory” account of social cognition believe to
give us an inferential, reflective (and what might be called a ‘third-person’) grasp of others’
mental states (Frith & Frith 2006, 2010). The apparent disparity between these sets of results
may, however, arise from differences in the experimental paradigms used (cf. Keysers & Gazzola
2007), which run the danger of presupposing the very theoretical frameworks they claim to test.
Consequently, both of these paradigms are investigating actual, but limited domains of social
cognition. Both are, in effect, committed to spectator theories of knowledge. They have focused
on the use of “isolation paradigms” (Becchio et al. 2010), in which participants are required to
merely observe others or think about their mental states rather than participate in social
interaction with them. Consequently, it has remained unclear whether and how activity in the
large-scale neural networks described above is modulated by the degree to which a person does
or does not feel actively involved in an ongoing interaction and whether the networks might
subserve complementary or mutually exclusive roles in this case (Schilbach 2010). After more
than a decade of research, the neural mechanisms underlying social interaction have remained
elusive and could —paradoxically— be seen as representing the ‘dark matter’
1
of social
1
In sensu strictu, the term dark matter is used in physics and astronomy to describe matter, which is inferred
to exist, but which has not been directly observed and may not even be observable. We use the term metaphorically
to denote an important lacuna in current areas of research in social neuroscience, which have been more difficult to
investigate and where, therefore, less is known, but which can at least in principle be explored empirically. To index
this particular usage of the term, ‘dark matter’ is consistently used in inverted commas throughout the paper.

3
neuroscience.
In this target article we propose an approach to the investigation of social cognition focused on
‘second-person’ engagements. This approach, we argue, will help to throw light on this ‘dark
matter’ and may help social neuroscience to really go social.
1.1 Spectator Theories of Other Minds
Spectatorial accounts of social knowing are not restricted to social neuroscience, but have been
central to the Western intellectual tradition (Dewey 1950). Psychological accounts of how people
make sense of other people have usually shared a common format:
Each is a detached observer, rather than actively engaged with the other in
some joint project.
The information available to each of us about other people is limited and
disorganized, and hence there is a gulf between what we can actually
observe about them, and what they themselves feel, intend, or believe.
Each of us, therefore, has to engage in some or other intellectual ‘detour’
to bridge the gap between what can be immediately experienced about the
other person and that person’s psychological states (see Asch 1952).
As Neisser has pointed out, this detached and intellectualist theoretical approach to how people
make sense of one another has been built into the research which was supposed to support that
very position: namely, people observing video-recordings of other people, and making judgments
of what they saw:
The theories and experiments ... all refer to an essentially passive
onlooker, who sees someone do something (or sees two people do
something) and then makes a judgment about it. He … doesn’t mix it up
with the folks he’s watching, never tests his judgments in action or
interaction. He just watches and makes judgments. [...] When people are
genuinely engaged with one another, nobody stops to give grades (Neisser
1980, pp.603-4).

4
Modern cognitive psychology has retained “methodological behaviorism” from precisely the
psychology it claims to have undermined (see Costall 2006; Garner 1999; Jenkins 1986; Leahey
1992; Neisser 1997). According to the textbooks, psychologists in their research necessarily start
from the observation of inherently meaningless, “colorless behavior” (Hull 1943, p.25) and can
only begin to make psychological sense of what they observe on the basis of theorizing. Few
modern psychologists, of course, are Cartesian dualists: they rightly insist that they do not make
an ontological disjunction between behavior and mind.
Nevertheless, psychologists keep framing their methodology, in principle if not in their actual
practice, in the old Hullian, reductionist terms, and hence keep talking themselves into a
methodological dualism of behavior and mind. In so doing, they resurrect for themselves the
traditional dualistic ‘problem’ of other minds. And, when Theory Theorists project this
methodology onto other people and how they make sense of one another, they often enough also
carry the same insoluble problem with them. In relation to the other domains to which it has been
applied, the “Theory Theory” approach has taken for granted that the child has already acquired a
substantial practical understanding of the social domain before attempting to systematize his or
her existing knowledge (such as friction or collisions in the domain of physics, and reproduction
and growth in the domain of biology). This is not the case for “Theory Theory” of Mind (TToM)
in its original form, for, according to TToM, it is only once children have developed a “Theory of
Mind” that they have access to any of the necessary psychological data upon which the theory
could be based.
Of course, “Theory of Mind” does not refer to a theory in the scientific sense, but denotes an
empirical field of study with (apparently) no particular theoretical commitments (cf. Penn &
Povinelli 2008, p.394). Yet to the extent that the most important alternative approach,
“Simulation Theory”, frames the problem of how people make sense of other people in terms of
how psychologists make a detour from the observation of ‘mere’ behavior to psychological states
they both face the same logical impasse. Indeed, there could be no naturally occurring precursors
to “Theory of Mind”, not even evolved ones, if the problem of how we really make sense of one
another is framed in terms of this kind of methodological dualism (see Costall et al. 2006; Leudar
& Costall 2008).

5
1.2 An alternative account of social knowing
Before the rise of recent social cognition research there was already an important body of theory
and research proposing that, typically, when relating to one another, people are not engaged in a
tortuous process of inferences and theorizing about one another, but immediately experience the
other as a subject (see Asch 1952; Heider & Simmel 1944; Runeson & Frykholm 1983; Schutz
1972; Thinès et al. 1991). This approach drew upon Gestalt theory and phenomenology. Here is
Solomon Asch's lucid statement of this position:
The quality of their actions imbues persons with living reality. When we
say that a person is in pain, we see his body as feeling. We do not need to
‘impute’ consciousness to others if we directly perceive the qualities of
consciousness in the qualities of action. Once we see an act that is skillful,
clumsy, alert, or reckless, it is superfluous to go ‘behind’ it to its
conscious substrate, for consciousness has revealed itself in the act (Asch
1952, p.158).
This social perception approach is close to the theoretical perspective we are presenting in this
target article. It is not detached; it is not dispassionate. However, it is, nevertheless, committed to
an observer epistemology, a spectator theory of how we relate to other people. Knowing others is
limited to perceiving them. In this target article, we will be arguing for an approach to social
knowing based on interaction and emotional engagements between people, rather than mere
observation. This ‘second-person’ approach has already begun to prove productive within
developmental and social psychology and points toward the importance of experiencing and
interacting with others as our primary ways of knowing them (see Section 2 for details). Also,
preliminary evidence from neuroimaging and psychophysiological studies demonstrates profound
differences in neural processing related to the reciprocity of social interaction, which is consistent
with our proposal that the second-person approach can make an important contribution to the
neuroscientific study of social encounters and could, in fact, lead to the development of a second-
person neuroscience (Section 3). In this respect, we provide an outlook for future research by
describing key ideas and objectives of a second-person neuroscience and related objectives in
other areas of research (Section 4). Finally, we argue that the second-person account may also be
relevant for our understanding of psychiatric disorders: While psychiatric disorders such as

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What contributions have the authors mentioned in the paper "Toward a second-person neuroscience" ?

In spite of the remarkable progress made in the burgeoning field of social neuroscience, the neural mechanisms that underlie social encounters are only beginning to be studied and could —paradoxically— be seen as representing the ‘ dark matter ’ of social neuroscience. Recent conceptual and empirical developments consistently indicate the need for investigations, which allow the study of real-time social encounters in a truly interactive manner. In this article, the authors outline the theoretical conception of a second-person approach to other minds and review evidence from neuroimaging, psychophysiological studies and related fields to argue for the development of a second-person neuroscience, which will help neuroscience to really go social ; this may also be relevant for their understanding of psychiatric disorders construed as disorders of social cognition. This suggestion is based on the premise that social cognition is fundamentally different when the authors are in interaction with others rather than merely observing them. 

Q2. What future works have the authors mentioned in the paper "Toward a second-person neuroscience" ?

Finally, the authors address how insights from a second-person account could be put to use in future research using computational neuroscience techniques and in the emerging field of social neuroendocrinology ( see section 4. 3 ). Concerning the second type of studies, the authors suggest that using the established possibility of exploring joint attention in the scanner may help to understand the neural underpinnings of other ( possibly more explicit ) social cognitive tasks: Overall, the next section, therefore, serves to consider potential new avenues that research might take by embracing a second-person approach. Basically the authors see three options to address this within the context of measuring a single brain: ( a ) studies contrasting the information one can obtain when being in interaction with versus observing someone ( learning studies ) ; ( b ) studies contrasting the effects of being in interaction with versus observing someone on subsequent judgments and behavior ( priming studies ) ; ( c ) studies that establish whether they are susceptible to different contextual influences when they are interacting versus observing.