SOCIAL COGNITION AND EXECUTIVE

FUNCTIONING: A CONSTRUCTIVIST
DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH
Oana BENGA ∗ , Laura PETRA
Program of Cognitive Neuroscience
Department of Psychology, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

ABSTRACT
The present paper extends a previous discussion on social cognition as an
emergent construction, at the interplay of internal (individual) and external
(environmental) constraints (Benga, 2004) along development. A special
emphasis is given to internal constraints, particularly executive abilities –
with a focus on the ontogenetic progression of inhibitory control. Crossings
of executive abilities with theory of mind, but also with earlier joint attention
abilities are discussed, within a social cognitive neuroscience perspective.

KEY-WORDS: social cognition, theory of mind, executive abilities, inhibitory

control, anterior cingulate cortex

The search for potential neural underpinnings of social cognition has

nurtured the recent development of a new interdisciplinary field – that of social
cognitive neuroscience (Ochsner & Lieberman, 2001, Blakemore, Winston &
Frith, 2004, Adolphs, 2005, Lieberman & Pfeifer, in press). The junction of social
psychology with cognitive neuroscience allows for a new kind of understanding, in
terms of neural systems that might be related, at the most sophisticated end of
social cognition, to the phenomenology of the person herself. Yet, no matter how
appealing and promising this enterprise might be, it sounds, though, a risky
approach. There are a lot of (still nascent but) essential questions: How reliable are
those conjectures linking neurophysiological mechanisms and complex social
behavior, and how (maybe excessively) reductionist this search might prove to be?
How much can be gained, in the end, from the knowledge of the neural
mechanisms of social psychological processes? How much modularity is it
reasonable to expect from such approaches? Is there indeed a „social brain”
specially designed for our social world?

∗
Corresponding address:
Oana Benga, Department of Psychology, Babeş-Bolyai University, 37 Republicii Street,
Cluj-Napoca CJ 400015, Romania.
E-mail: oanabenga@psychology.ro

Iunie 2005 • Cogniţie, Creier, Comportament 301

 A core critical question derived out of these interogations concerns the
relationship between (putative) „pure” cognitive and „pure” social processes. Are
general cognitive processes or computations sufficient to explain social
competence, or not (see Blakemore, Winston & Frith, 2004)? Or is social
information processing neurally and/or computationally encapsulated?
Developmental literature might offer an answer to this. Yet, the
developmental perspective on social cognitive neuroscience is still missing. As
Griffin & Baron-Cohen (2002) pointed out, not only developmental data are
lacking, but neuroimaging and adult lesion literature on the neural mechanisms of
social perception and cognition is also often devoid of a developmental
perspective. The neurophysiological processes that underpin prerequisites or early
blocks of social learning/social cognition are far from being known.
Facing this appealing yet problematic background, we suggest that a good
start for approaching the developmental cognitive neuroscience of social cognition
would be to understand social cognition inside a constructivist developmental
framework .

SOCIAL COGNITION AS A DEVELOPMENTAL

CONSTRUCTION

The essentially interpretative nature of human mind is reflected at its most

when confronting social reality, the mind-reading or mentalizing ability (Baron-
Cohen, 2000, Frith & Frith, 2003) imposing the ubiquitous understanding of
agents’ behaviors in terms of intentions and inner mental states. In spite of the fact
that such interpretations seem to be triggered automatically, act irrepressibly and
even be aquired implicitly (a fact that much of the developmental literature
acknowledges), the most proeminent theory of social learning/social cognition still
considers it equivalent to an explicit, rational, conscious, "machiavellian" (Nelson,
1996) body of knowledge, called theory of mind (TOM), presumed to be supported
by the (pre-specified) social brain (Brothers, 1990), and to be operational starting
with the age 4 .
In a previous paper (Benga, 2004) we challenged this rather restrictive
view, and proposed a different approach instead: the construction of social
cognition at the intersection of internal (individual) and external (environmental)
constraints. The very concept of social cognition has been redefined in a broader
sense, as the processing of social stimuli representations, that can be either
symbolic or sub-symbolic (activation patterns) (Miclea, 1994). We sustained the
idea that the hybrid nature of the human cognitive system allows for both kinds of
representations (Miclea & Curşeu, 2003), and also for the chronological advantage
of sub-symbolic representations, which can be investigated at even younger ages.
Also, we advanced the hypothesis that the later, symbolic representations can be
developed from early systems, as long as at least existing simulation models can be
implemented in connexionist architectures.

302 Social cognition and executive functioning

 In approaching social cognition beyond theory of mind, we have advanced
the gradual emergence of social cognition along a temporal line starting before and
developing after the age of 4 (the postulated age of social cognition coming of
age), along a continuous trajectory - from early abilities of interaction and
understanding of the social world, to later social-cognitive functioning. In the same
line of thought, we have argued that the qualitative leap at 4 years is not
necessarily due to a representational change, but to other abilities “recruited” by
social cognition: executive functions, language and mediated by this last one, but
not reducible to it, autobiographical memory (which has an almost simultaneous
development).
Our constructivist developmental approach to social cognition, understood
as the processing of social stimuli representations, both in a symbolic and a sub-
symbolic manner, has benefited from the dual-process theory of attribution (see
Lieberman, Gaunt, Gilbert & Trope, 2002) which opposed an automatic so-called
reflexive (X system) to a controlled reflective (C) system. In their view, the X-
system is confined to parallel processing, operating sub-symbolically, and probably
reflects the activity of the amygdala, basal ganglia and lateral temporal cortex,
being involved in automatic categorization and behavior identification; the C-
system is a serial-operating system, symbolic logic system, that has at the neural
level a correspondent in the anterior cingulate gyrus, prefrontal cortex and
hippocampus, and is dedicated to conscious experience, reflecting on and even
rejecting the reactions of the X-system. Lieberman et al. (2002) agreed in
considering that both these systems construct reality.
The ontogenetic evolution of intrinsic and extrinsic constraints, as well as
their interplay, allow for the progressive development of social cognition. The
large amount of data on early social-cognitive abilities sustain our approach. We
proposed (Benga, 2004) the following scenario which unfolds the development of
both sub-symbolic and symbolic social cognition.
Birth: the first representations of social stimuli in terms of: schematic
configurations of human faces, voices/ human language, biological movement.
2 months: a social stimulus is the one that responds in a contingent manner to the
child’s actions and emotions.
3-6 months: a subsymbolical representation of the person is being constructed, as
different from a non-social entity, characterized by eye movements/gaze shifting,
different facial expressions, human face, human voice, biological self-propelled
movement.
6-12 months: the “other” is becoming an agent invested with intentionality, in a
telelological as well as referential sense The classical early social-cognitive
behaviors, online from 9-12 months, are: joint attention (JA) following; JA
directing – imperative and declarative; social referencing; delayed imitation.
12-18 months: an explosion of social-cognitive gestures; the primitives of a
symbolic - conscious social cognition are transparent in joint attention behaviors.
18-24 months: the components of a naïve theory of mind can already be identified:
1st level perception; wishes and emotions; simulation – obvious in symbolic play,

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and even an implicit form of false beliefs. Other inciting acquisitions include the
emergence of self-awareness.
2-5 years: the metarepresentational social cognition is being constructed. Human
beings have an almost complete set of mental states: perceptions, wishes, emotions,
knowledge states, false beliefs. The representation of others comes along with a
more coherent understanding of the self - that has autobiographical memory as a
basis.
5-7 years: Objective causes of a situation are being distinguished from one’s
arguments connected to the same situation. The child can operate with notions of
truth, inference, surprise, attention
7-11 years: progress of theory of mind with 2nd order false beliefs. Other aspects of
the mental world accessible to the child are: incertitude, the distinction
consciousness-unconsciousness, surprise caused by someone’s false beliefs.
Adolescence and adulthood: Social cognition continues to develop, as proved by
the multiplicity of phenomena approached by social psychology (group
stereotypes, knowledge about other individuals, the self, culture).
Internal constraints have mostly been considered as starting to act at a very
early age and having a predominantly intraindividual nature, as mechanisms of
preferential orientation of attention towards certain objects or phenomena in the
environment, that restrict children’s searching space and allow a better learning of
these very entities and their characteristics (see Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; Elman et
al., 1996). We have proposed that intrinsic constraints continue to shape
interindividual differences at older ages. If initially these constraints are low-level
ones, being related to mainly subcortical or even cortical neural mechanisms, but
dedicated to automatic processing of social stimuli, we consider that later
interindividual differences can be noticed also in the field of controlled processing
– like the executive functions. It is apparent that even intrinsic constraints are being
modulated by the interaction with the environment, while development advances
(we have discussed in detail the relevance of this interaction when considering how
environmentally-induced attachment disturbancies can lead to future executive
attention problems - Benga, 2001).
We consider that executive functions (and particularly executive attention)
are internal constraint mechanisms for social cognition, restricting or widening the
acquisition/processing of social information. However, they are distinct
phenomena, as long as only social cognition, but not executive functions, has a
conceptual nature, becoming at adulthood a well-circumscribed specific knowledge
domain.

304 Social cognition and executive functioning

 EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS - INTERNAL CONSTRAINTS FOR
SOCIAL COGNITION

Conceptual delineations of executive functions

Described as an “ill-defined but important construct” (Kerr & Zelazo,

2004), executive functions are partly overlapped with domains such as attention,
reasoning and problem-solving. Typical lists of executive functions (EF) include
set-shifting and set maintenance, interference control, inhibition, integration across
space and time, planning and working memory. Central ideas in the concept cover:
1) context-specific action selection, especially in the face of strongly competing,
but context-inappropriate, responses; 2) maximal constraint satisfaction in action
selection, with the integration of constraints from a variety of other domains, such
as perception, memory, emotion and motivation (Pennington & Ozonoff, 1996).
Yet we think that executive function deficits are not specific enough, due to the
fact that the umbrella term “executive function(s)” has usually been
operationalized through a large variety of tasks, mostly neuropsychological tests,
having a highly complex structure. This problem becomes even more acute when
facing the relationship with mentalizing abilities.
Molar analyses of the executive functions proposed two basic components
– working memory and inhibition (see Cohen & Servan-Schreiber, 1992; Kimberg
& Farah, 1993), a recent study of Miyake, Friedman & Emerson (2000) adding a
third dimension - shifting or flexibility.

Theory of mind and executive functions

Several arguments, at different levels of analysis, have been used in order

to suggest the relationship between executive functions and social cognition. The
major one has been offered by the joint analysis of theory of mind (TOM) (the
classical sign of maturity in social cognition) and executive functions tasks.
In their exhaustive metanalysis, Wellman, Cross & Watson (2001) show that
the critical interval for passing TOM tasks is from 3 to 4 years of age. This time
interval coincides more or less with a critical step in the development of executive
functions as well (see next section).
Moreover, task analyses performed on the classical TOM tasks – the false
belief tasks – suggested that executive requirements are constraining the social
cognitive performance (see Bloom & German, 2000).
The covariation in the patterns of performance for TOM and executive
functions tasks is another fruitful line of investigation (Perner & Lang, 1999,
2000). However, debates still address the very components of executive functions
linked to social cognition/theory of mind. A potential resolution is still problematic
due to the variety of tasks and procedures involved in different joint analyses of the
two mechanisms.

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 Hughes (1998) found that working memory and inhibitory control correlated
with TOM performace (measured via false belief and deceiving tasks) but also
flexibility was associated with deceiving. Carlson & Moses (2001) found a strong
correlation between a theory of mind and an inhibition/inhibitory control task
battery, correlation remaining significant after partialling age, receptive
vocabulary, sex and additional controls (sibling status, symbolic play). The relation
was especially strong for conflict inhibition as opposed to delay inhibition.
Carlson, Moses & Breton (2002) further suggested that a combination of inhibition
and working memory capacity plays a crucial role in children’s understanding of
false beliefs. The study of Carlson, Moses & Claxton (2004) confirmed the
correlation of TOM tasks with inhibitory control tasks, but not with planning tasks.
Friedman & Leslie (2005) also offered data showing that inhibition is the
critical factor constraining false belief task performance. According to the theory
of Leslie, children’s belief-desire reasoning is possible by two neurocognitive
mechanisms, the Theory of Mind Mechanism and the Selection Processor: while
the first one provides children with certain basic mental states concepts, the second
helps select the correct content for the mental states to be attributed (Leslie, 1987,
1994; Roth & Leslie, 1998). However, this is a highly specific account of
inhibitory contributions to theory of mind performance.
Yet, across a series of 178 studies of false beliefs testing in children 3 to 4
years of age, Wellman, Cross & Watson (2001) showed the importance of
inhibitory control: at younger ages a better control correlates with higher TOM
performance; at all ages, reducing the inhibitory demands of TOM tasks improves
performance.
One might question the direction of this consistent relationship inhibitory
control-theory of mind. According to Perner & Lang (1999, 2000), children must
have a TOM before they are able to represent and implement switching rules and
background conditions in tests of what they call executive inhibition. However,
these authors focus on metacognitive control as a critical point in the emergence of
executive functions, having the same metarepresentational nature as mentalizing
abilities.
The opposite account would be that a certain level of self-regulation is
critical for the very emergence of theory of mind. Logitudinal data sustain this
hypothesis. Carlson, Mandell & Williams (2004) found that executive control at 24
months predict TOM performance at 39 months, independent of several controls,
and also sustained the stability of individual differences in executive functioning
across time. Flynn, O’Malley & Wood (2004) studied via a longitudinal
microgenetic study a population of children at the point of emergence of false
beliefs understanding. Their data support the hypothesis that executive control (or
executive inhibition) is necessary for developing a TOM, children being able to
perform well on tests of executive inhibition before they understand false beliefs.
There are a few points to make regarding these data. First, it is still
debatable if executive functions are linked to theory of mind/social cognition or
just to the requirements of false belief tasks, which approximate TOM.

306 Social cognition and executive functioning

 Second, inhibition/inhibitory control is not “convertible” into conceptual
knowledge about mind and mental states. A similar position has been asserted by
Simpson & Riggs (2005) (in their view, poor performance in TOM tasks being a
combination of unsophisticated TOM, a prepotent response - the default
assumption that beliefs are true - and weak inhibitory control). We have suggested
that executive functions (and particularly executive attention) are internal
constraint mechanisms, which act upon social cognition, limiting or helping the
acquisition/processing of social information, but being distinguishable from it.
Third, inhibition (and even executive functions as a whole) is just one of
the factors (we call them constraints) involved in TOM emergence. The
combination of inhibitory control and working memory has already been outlined.
Another account put forward by authors like Zelazo suggest that flexibility is the
critical factor involved in the emergence of TOM. Müller, Zelazo & Imrisek (2005)
showed that Dimensional Change Card Sorting performance predicted false belief
performance, even after controlling for children’s age and verbal ability, the
underlying mechanisms being, in their view, representational flexibility, or
shifting, in the context of conflicting information. This is considered a major
argument for the Cognitive Complexity and Control theory (Frye, Zelazo & Palfai,
1995; Frye, Zelazo & Burack, 1998; Zelazo & Frye, 1997): the critical requirement
for both TOM tasks and executive function tasks, that are progressively passed
around the age of 4, is the emergence of the ability to formulate and use a more
complex reasoning structure (if-if-then rules), that allows to embed one set of
judgments within another. CCC theory thus invokes and explains inhibition, rather
than postulates it as the final mechanism underlying children’s performance (see
Happaney & Zelazo, 2003).
Fourth, there is a significant diversity and a gradual progression in children’s
individual profiles, multiple factors converging in determining pathways towards
the understanding of mental states.

Developmental progression of executive systems

All studies we have already mentioned limit their approach to the emergence
of TOM and its correlates at the level of executive functions. According to our
position, the development of a metacognitive theory of mind around the age of 4 is
just one step in the trajectory of social cognition. In the same time, we
acknowledge an early-starting ontogenetic scenario of the executive abilities,
which offer good reasons to consider them acting as internal constraints for social
cognition from earlier ages.
From an ontogenetic point of view, it was proposed that the first form of
executive regulation acts upon behavior as a distress controlling mechanism via
attention focusing, suggesting an inhibitory control on the amygdala by mid frontal
regions – particularly the anterior cingulate gyrus (Posner & Rothbart, 1998, 2000;
Rueda, Posner & Rothbart, 2004). At the end of the first year of life, the
development of the “anterior attention system” (Posner & Rothbart, 1991) is

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considered to assure the major achievment of self-regulation. The same
mechanisms used to cope with self-regulation are then transferred to issues of
control of cognition during later infancy and childhood (Posner & Rothbart, 1998).
The mechanisms for endogenous orientation of attention are also
transparent in anticipatory eye movements and in suppression of automatic
saccades (Johnson, 1995a; Colombo, 2001).
Yet, a definite sign of cognitive control is typically considered the
inhibition of prepotent response in A-not-B tasks (Diamond, 1991; Diamond,
2001) at the end of the first year of life, achievment related to the maturation of
dorsolateral prefrontal structures. Electrophysiological studies (Bell, 2001, 2002)
confirmed, for high-performing infants, an increase in the 6-9 Hz EEG power from
baseline to task in several frontal and some posterior cortical regions.
The next step in the development of executive abilities is made around the
end of the second year. Clohessy, Posner & Rothbart (2001) found that children as
young as 18 months show generalization of conflict resolution behaviors,
transparent in the ability to learn context dependent and ambiguous associations
(sequences like 1→2→1→3). Beginning at 24 months, there is a clear above-
chance choice of the correct ambiguous association (Rothbart, Ellis, Rueda &
Posner, 2003).
Further developments in the inhibition of prepotent responses were
outlined using the spatial conflict task (Gerardi-Caulton, 2000; Rothbart et al.,
2003) in children 2 to 3 years old. It seems that around 30 months children become
more and more able to inhibit prepotent responses. The even more remarkable
finding was the correlation between cognitive measurements of conflict resolution
and aspects of effortful control and negative affect in parental reports of children’s
behavior in their normal environment.
The gradual progression of executive abilites along the preschool years has
been explored using a large variety of paradigms/tasks/formats/scoring procedures,
making sometimes difficult the comparison within and across ages (e.g.,Gerstadt,
Hong & Diamond, 1994; Diamond & Taylor, 1996; Berger, Jones, Rothbart &
Posner, 2000; Durston et al., 2002; Jones, Rothbart & Posner, 2003; Prevor &
Diamond, 2005). Still, the progress is already clear from 3 to 4 years of age, with a
further developmental trend in the ability to suppress information and actions over
the ages 4 to 12, both in terms of reaction time and accuracy (such age-related
changes have generally not been observed in tasks without interfering
information). For example, Rueda et al. (2004), using the Attention Network Test
(ANT), showed that conflict scores demonstrate stability at age 7 and reach adult
levels around age 10. Compared to this, the performance of 4 year old children is
marked by longer reaction times (RTs) and conflict scores, behavioral
characteristics that are paralleled by longer latency and sustained congruency effect
on the ERPs at both midline frontal and parietal sites (Rueda, Posner, Rothbart &
Davis-Stober, 2004). Critical dimensions of executive functioning that have been
invoked underlying these results are inhibition/inhibitory control, working memory

308 Social cognition and executive functioning

and recently “attentional inertia” (Kirkham, Cruess & Diamond, 2003) – the
difficulty in disengaging from a mindset that is no longer relevant.
The neural mechanisms underpinning these progressive changes have been
studied with electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques In an exploratory
study, Wolfe & Bell (2004) analyzed the EEG characteristics of 41/2 age children,
during 2 tasks combining working memory and inhibitory control (WMIC)
requirements.They could show an increase in EEG power from baseline to task in
the medial frontal region, and also a trend for the high-performing WMIC children
to have greater EEG power values overall, indicating greater maturation of EEG.
Neuroimaging studies sustain these findings. For example, an early study
demonstrated significantly greater activation in children 7 to 12 years age relative
to adults, when performing a response inhibition task (Go-NoGo paradigm),
activation distributed across both the dorsolateral and orbitofrontal cortices;
however, only activity in the orbital frontal and anterior cingulate cortices
correlated with behavioral performance (Casey et al., 1997). Recently, Durston et
al. (2002) acknowledged that successful response inhibition within the same
paradigm was associated with stronger activation of prefrontal and parietal regions
(bilateral ventral prefrontal cortex, right parietal lobe, right dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex), sustaining the role of the ventral fronto-striatal circuitry and its maturation
in the development of inhibitory control, activation of this circuitry being
correlated both with age and performance. The same study pointed, however, the
difference between children and adults in the sense of a greater susceptibility to
interference, regardless of preceeding context, in the case of children. According to
the mechanistic model of cognitive control (Casey, Tottenham & Fossella, 2002),
the basal ganglia are involved in suppression of irrelevant actions, while the frontal
cortex is involved in representing and maintaining relevant information,
development being thus circumscribed to the maturation of the basal ganglia
thalamocortical loops.
Executive development further extends throughout childhood and
adolescence. Although perspectives are not always congruent, it seems that the
neural underpinnings of all this longitudinal progression are circumscribed mainly
to anterior structures (anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal areas) and basal
ganglia (see Rueda, Posner & Rothbart, 2004).
If this picture covers the development of “cold” executive functions, “hot”
executive functions have recently gained interest as well. Kerr & Zelazo (2004)
noticed a rapid progression from 3 to 4 years of age in affective decision making,
regarding events that have emotionally significant consequences (like meaningful
rewards and losses). Similarly with adults, 8 to 18 years olds showed the activation
of the same brain circuitry involved in reward-related activity (gains and losses):
ventral striatum, lateral and medial orbital-frontal cortices (May et al., 2004).

Iunie 2005 • Cogniţie, Creier, Comportament 309

 Common neural underpinnings for social cognition and executive
functioning

The hypothesis of a modular, encapsulated social cognition is less popular at

the moment, moreover if we consider the broad spectrum of human social abilites.
A neural system solely dedicated to social cognition is, from this perspective, less
plausible; multiple circuits have been correlated with social cognition and they
include lateral temporal cortex - inferotemporal cortex, lateral fusiform gyrus,
superior temporal sulcus, amygdala, somatosensory cortex, occipital cortex,
parietal cortex, temporal pole, orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex,
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, hippocampus (see Adolphs, 2003, for a review). Yet
there are few structures disproportionately correlated with social behavior and
cognition – like prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala (Adolphs,
2005), which are good candidates to a “social brain” in a broad sense.
Prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex are intriguing candidates as
well, since their involvement has been proved in non-social (executive) tasks, from
an early age to adulthood.
In a recent study, Nuñez, Casey, Egner, Hare & Hirsch (2005) studied the
ability to deceive via an fMRI study, intentional false responding being correlated
with increased activation within the anterior cingulate, caudate and thalamic nuclei,
and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the same circuit shown to be implicated in
response conflict and cognitive control. Authors support the idea that “interference
is integral to the act of falsifying responses” (p. 273), a significant amount of
conflict and cognitive control being needed in order to successfully execute false
responses. Interestingly, interference was not only signaled at the neural level, but
also present at the behavioral level, in longer RTs for false responses. The effect
was even more robust for falsifying autobiographical responses. Activation of the
anterior cingulate, mesial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices correlated with
self-report personality measures from the Psychopathic Personality Inventory.
The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is of particular interest, because
several studies on mentalizing pointed it as the locus of the most consistent brain
activation (Frith & Frith, 2001, 2003, Mundy, 2001). On the other hand, it is a core
structure which seems to be assigned to conflict monitoring in “pure” cognitive
tasks (see Botvinick, Cohen & Carter, 2004, for a review). An operational
distinction takes into account its functional divisions: the ventral anterior cingulate
has been acknowledged as the affective/visceral division – rostral areas 24a-c and
32 and ventral areas 25 and 33 - connected to the amygdala, periaqueductal gray,
hypothalamus, anterior insula, hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex. The dorsal
ACC is generally considered the cognitive division – areas 24 a’-c’ and 32’ - being
connected to lateral prefrontal cortex (46/9), parietal cortex (7), premotor and
supplementary motor areas. Ventral affective division is thought to be responsible
for the evaluation of salience of emotional information and emotion regulation,
while dorsal cognitive division is responsible for executive functions like conflict
and error monitoring, as shown by human as well as animal studies (Bush, Luu &

310 Social cognition and executive functioning

Posner, 2000, Cardinal, Parkinson, Hall & Everitt, 2002, Hadland, Rushworth,
Gaffan & Passingham, 2003, Yücel et al., 2003). The functional overlap within
ACC distinguish it from other frontal regions, placing it as a pivotal structure for
translating intentions to actions (according to Paus, 2001).
In the realm of cognitive neuroscience, anterior cingulate cortex has been
related to theory of mind. For example, Gallagher et al. (2000) showed, using
fMRI, that both verbally and nonverbally presented theory of mind tasks involve
bilateral activation of BA 32 and BA 24. The meta-analysis of Gallagher & Frith
(2003) sustained the involvement of these two regions, along with that of medial
frontal regions BA 8 and 9, in-between which stands area 32, in tasks devoted to
causality, intentionality, self-perspective.
How can be interpreted this activation is still not very clear. For Gallagher
& Frith (2003) it is a sign that ACC is specialized for directing attention to mental
states. Other authors like Allman, Hakeem & Watson (2002) consider that ACC is
phylogenetically specialized, along with BA 10, to convey the motivation to act,
initiating adaptive responses that help self-regulation, as the individual matures and
gains social insight. In addition to this, as we discussed elsewhere (Benga, 2005),
one cannot overlook the previous phylogenetical specialization of this structure for
social bonding and social communication/vocalization.
We have also suggested that from a social cognitive neuroscience perspective,
it would be interesting to search for the potential involvement of the anterior
cingulate in early social cognitive behaviors. Actually, there are several studies
pointing to the activation of the anterior cingulate cortex during declarative joint
attention behaviors. Mundy (2001) suggested that, in infants, the most consistent
correlates of declarative or initiating joint attention (IJA) skills across studies are
activations in dorsal medial frontal cortex and related cingulate areas. For example,
Caplan et al. (1993) showed on a PET study with epileptic children that
preoperative glucose metabolism in the left frontal regions positively predicted the
children’s postoperative IJA behaviors. Mundy, Card & Fox (2000) presented data
suggesting that IJA at 14 months coupled with a complex pattern of EEG activity
in the 4-6 Hz band, that indicates left medial-frontal EEG activation, predict IJA at
18 months. The frontal correlates were obtained from electrodes positioned on a
point of confluence of BA 8 and 9, that includes activation from the anterior
cingulate cortex as well. Similar results were obtained by Henderson, Yoder,
Davis, Yale & McDuffie (2002).
The interpretative hypothesis for all these data (Mundy, 2001) suggest that
IJA is a component of an integrated system predisposing the child to find social
interaction rewarding and to share positive affect/experiences with the others.
Our own data are also in line with these findings. If other authors have
studied children 14 months or older, we focused on 9-12 months infants, at the
very beginning of their declarative behaviors (Benga, Nakagawa & Sukigara,
2002). In our subjects, the emergence of the first IJA behaviors seem to be
predicted by antisaccade performance (using the paradigm proposed by Johnson,
1995b) - the ability to suppress automatic saccades, one of the first inhibitory

Iunie 2005 • Cogniţie, Creier, Comportament 311

mechanisms already functional at 4-6 months, which has been linked to the activity
of frontal eye fields (BA8) and also to the anterior cingulate cortex.
This pilot study indicates that executive abilities might be considered
constraining early social cognitive behaviors years before the exhaustively
analyzed age of theory of mind emergence, and its junction with the maturation of
executive functions. Further analyses might clarify the involvement of certain
neural structures (particularly, the anterior cingulate cortex) in the contruction of
social cognition, at the interplay of internal and external constraints.

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