- Social Interaction, Social learning, Social decision-making, Autism Spectrum Conditions, Neuroimaging, Computational Neuromodeling, and 25 morePredictive coding, Cultural Historical Activity Theory, Sociocultural Theory, Phenomenology, Developmental Psychology, Social Philosophy, Social Sciences, Facial expression, Machine Learning, Hybrid Pedagogy, Philosophy of Mind, Social Cognition, Embodied Embedded Cognition, Enactivism, Extended Mind, Social Neuroscience, Imitation, Collective Action, Hegel, Collective Memory, Collectivism & Individualism, Social Psychology, Vygotsky, Dialectics, and Bayesianedit
- Drawing from multiple perspectives, ranging from engineering and neuroscience to psychology and philosophy, I am tryi... moreDrawing from multiple perspectives, ranging from engineering and neuroscience to psychology and philosophy, I am trying to gain a better insight into social interactions, as well as relevant conditions, with an emphasis on autism.
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https://sites.google.com/site/dimitrisbolis/edit
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Social neuroscience has often been criticized for approaching the investigation of the neural processes that enable social interaction and cognition from a passive, detached, third-person perspective, with participants acting as mere... more
Social neuroscience has often been criticized for approaching the investigation of the neural processes that enable social interaction and cognition from a passive, detached, third-person perspective, with participants acting as mere observers of others’ behavior and making judgements based on their observations, without involving any real time social interaction. With the emergence of so-called second-person neuroscience, investigators have enriched the field with findings that evince the unique complexity of neural activation patterns in actual, real-time interaction. This line of work suggests that the kind of social cognition that occurs during social interaction is fundamentally different to that unfolding during social observation. However, it remains unclear how the neural correlates of social interaction are to be interpreted. Here, we leverage the active inference framework to shed light on the mechanisms at play during social interaction in second-person neuroscience studi...
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Human trust can be construed as a heuristic wager on the predictability and benevolence of others, within a compatible worldview. A leap of faith across gaps in information. Generally, we posit that trust constitutes a functional bridge... more
Human trust can be construed as a heuristic wager on the predictability and benevolence of others, within a compatible worldview. A leap of faith across gaps in information. Generally, we posit that trust constitutes a functional bridge between individual and group homeostasis, by helping minimize energy consumed in continuously monitoring the behavior of others and verifying their assertions, thus reducing group complexity and facilitating coordination. Indeed, we argue that trust is crucial to the formation and maintenance of collective entities. However, the wager that trust represents in the face of uncertainty leaves the possibility of misallocated trust, which can result in maladaptive outcomes for both individuals and groups. More specifically, trust can be thought of as a scale-invariant property of minimizing prediction error within ascending levels of social hierarchy ranging from individual brains to dyads, groups and societies, and ultimately civilizations. This framewor...
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In this review, we propose that interpersonal bodily interactions represent a fertile ground in which the bodily and psychological self is developed, gradually allowing for forms of more abstract and disembodied interactions. We start by... more
In this review, we propose that interpersonal bodily interactions represent a fertile ground in which the bodily and psychological self is developed, gradually allowing for forms of more abstract and disembodied interactions. We start by focusing on how early infant-caregiver bodily interactions, mediated by the sense of touch, play a crucial role in shaping the boundaries of the self but also in learning to predict others’ behavior. We then explore the social function of the sense of touch in the entire life span, highlighting its role in promoting physical and psychological wellbeing by supporting positive interpersonal exchanges. We go on by introducing the concept of implicit theory of mind, as the very early ability to interpret others’ intentions, possibly grounded in infant-caregiver bodily exchanges (embodied practices). In the second section, we embrace a more collective perspective about the role of sociality in human development, by describing the hypothesis of “dialectic...
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Autistic traits are known to be associated with social interaction difficulties. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, relevant research has been typically restricted to studying individuals. In line with the ‘dialectical misattunement hypothesis’... more
Autistic traits are known to be associated with social interaction difficulties. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, relevant research has been typically restricted to studying individuals. In line with the ‘dialectical misattunement hypothesis’ and clinical insights of intact social interactions among autistic individuals, we hypothesized that friendship quality varies as a function of interpersonal similarity and more concretely the difference value of autistic traits in a dyad, above and beyond autistic traits per se. Therefore, in this study, we used self-report questionnaires to investigate these measures in a sample of 67 neurotypical dyads across a broad range of autistic traits. Our results demonstrate that the more similar two persons are in autistic traits, the higher is the perceived quality of their friendship, irrespective of friendship duration, age, sex and, importantly, the (average of) autistic traits in a given dyad. More specifically, higher interpersonal similarity of a...
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Thinking Through Other Minds (TTOM) creatively situates the free energy principle within real-life cultural processes, thereby enriching both sociocultural theories and Bayesian accounts of cognition. Here, shifting the attention from... more
Thinking Through Other Minds (TTOM) creatively situates the free energy principle within real-life cultural processes, thereby enriching both sociocultural theories and Bayesian accounts of cognition. Here, shifting the attention from thinking to becoming, we suggest complementing such an account by focusing on the empirical, computational and conceptual investigation of the multiscale dynamics of social interaction.
Research Interests: Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Psychiatry, Human Evolution, Epistemology, and 15 moreDevelopment Studies, Psychophysiology, Autism, Bayesian, Cognition, Autism Spectrum Disorders, Social Cognition, Social Interaction, Culture, Cultural Historical Activity Theory, Cultural Evolution, Dialectic, Inference, Predictive coding, and Neurosciences
Research Interests: Psychology, Philosophy, Psychotherapy, Autism, Bayesian, and 15 moreAutism Spectrum Disorders, Embodied Cognition, Social Cognition, Social Interaction, Phenomenology, Human Development, Cultural Historical Activity Theory, Intersubjectivity, Dialectic, Enactivism, Predictive coding, Dialectics, Computational Psychiatry, Attunement, and Active Inference
The sense of agency is a core element of self-experiences and is defined as the feeling of oneself being the ‘initiator’ of an action. It is thought to depend on an implicit coupling of action-outcome predictions and the sensory... more
The sense of agency is a core element of self-experiences and is defined as the feeling of oneself being the ‘initiator’ of an action. It is thought to depend on an implicit coupling of action-outcome predictions and the sensory perception of the action. This concept is well-studied in the motor-domain, but less is known about agency during social interactions. It is clear that a sense of agency also occurs when we perform a social action (e. g. looking at someone’s eyes) and receiving feedback by another person (e. g. returning eye-contact). Here, we will refer to the experience of agency within a social interaction as the sense of social agency. The main aim of this article is to first, describe the concept of social agency and second review how virtual reality can help to simulate social interactions in order to systematically study self-experiences and social agency. Gaze-contingent eye-tracking paradigms represent a powerful tool in this endeavour, while we emphasise the import...
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Drawing on sociocultural theories and Bayesian accounts of brain function, in this article we construe psychiatric conditions as disorders of social interaction to fully account for their complexity and dynamicity across levels of... more
Drawing on sociocultural theories and Bayesian accounts of brain function, in this article we construe psychiatric conditions as disorders of social interaction to fully account for their complexity and dynamicity across levels of description and temporal scales. After an introduction of the theoretical underpinnings of our integrative approach, we take autism spectrum conditions (ASC) as a paradigm example and discuss how neurocognitive hypotheses can be translated into a Bayesian formulation, i.e., in terms of predictive processing and active inference. We then argue that consideration of individuals (even within a Bayesian framework) will not be enough for a comprehensive understanding of psychiatric conditions and consequently put forward the dialectical misattunement hypothesis, which views psychopathology not merely as disordered function within single brains but also as a dynamic interpersonal mismatch that encompasses various levels of description. Moving from a mere compari...
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A novel educational environment for kids with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs), namely NOESIS, is presented in this paper. NOESIS takes into account ASD kids ’ individual characteristics (level of autism, source sensitivity, reaction... more
A novel educational environment for kids with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs), namely NOESIS, is presented in this paper. NOESIS takes into account ASD kids ’ individual characteristics (level of autism, source sensitivity, reaction target, etc), their emotional state (stress level, hyper-/hypo-tension) during their educational procedure, and creativity during guided- and selfactivity (e.g., gaming). It adapts to each kid’s specific characteristics through system adaptation and selfregulation procedures. Moreover, it provides assistance to the educator for preparation, customization and optimization of the educational material for each kid and provision of enhanced evaluation procedures (scores/tools) via well-managed Web Services. Parents’ updating is also provided via reporting material with learning curve descriptions. Overall, NOESIS contributes to the provision of opportunities to all ASD children to be educated by facilitating access and tuning innovative technology to soci...
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We hypothesize that thalamocortical connections after mapping by diffusion tensor imaging can serve as surrogate markers of individual anatomy, which can then be used for localizing specific neurosurgical targets in the thalamus. A... more
We hypothesize that thalamocortical connections after mapping by diffusion tensor imaging can serve as surrogate markers of individual anatomy, which can then be used for localizing specific neurosurgical targets in the thalamus. A variety of learning schemes, together with preand postprocessing steps are studied for our goal of thalamic nuclei localization. The training procedure is performed after non-linear registration and probabilistic tractography on diffusion magnetic resonance imaging data. Our results indicate that thalamocortical connectivity data do contain sufficient discriminant internucleus information for thalamic nuclei localization.
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Conventional paradigms can successfully capture many cognitive processes, unveiling several (patho-)physiological mechanisms. However, often they come at the cost of tedious tasks for the participants, which can impose critical... more
Conventional paradigms can successfully capture many cognitive processes, unveiling several (patho-)physiological mechanisms. However, often they come at the cost of tedious tasks for the participants, which can impose critical restrictions especially when it comes to certain neurocognitive conditions. Immersive videogames could provide an entertaining alternative of higher ecological validity. Eye or other body movements could then be modeled for unveiling cognition, for example by modeling frameworks based on predictive coding theories for brain function. In this project, we present an approach that combines video games, eye tracking and Bayesian modeling (i.e. HGF, [1]) for studying learning and decision-making. To that end, first, an interactive videogame was developed. The player’s goal was to maximize a score by efficiently exploiting regularities in the environment, i.e. the game’s structure. Second, we conducted a proof-of-concept study with 10 healthy volunteers, considerin...
Poster: "ECR 2012 / C-1991 / Application of pattern recognition techniques to locate the Vim thalamic nucleus based on thalamocortical tractography" by: "D. Bolis1, A. Jakab1, O. Goksel1, G. Szekely2; 1Zurich/CH,... more
Poster: "ECR 2012 / C-1991 / Application of pattern recognition techniques to locate the Vim thalamic nucleus based on thalamocortical tractography" by: "D. Bolis1, A. Jakab1, O. Goksel1, G. Szekely2; 1Zurich/CH, 2Zurich/CH"