A General Architecture for Social Intelligence in the Human Mind & Brain

Abstract

Substantial evidence has amassed for social cognition in the human mind and brain, but surprisingly little theoretical work exists that organizes the information in a complete, coherent framework. To address this deficiency, we recently developed a general framework of social intelligence. Here we describe multiple further developments. In particular, we develop metacognitive control over the entire process of problem-solving based on social information, including management of multiple simultaneous problems, and active outcome monitoring. We better delineate the critical influence of affect/emotion, and we distinguish structure vs process throughout the model more explicitly, including specifying the inputs and outputs of each main process. Ultimately, a comprehensive social cognitive architecture will be needed for the common model of cognition.