Social Cognition, the Amygdala, and Autism

This chapter summarizes the lecture given at ICP 2016. It highlights the need to consider attention and motivation in studies of social cognition, the need for ecological validity and data‐driven approaches, and the need to draw conclusions based on multiple methods rather than a single one. It reviews work on a particular aspect of social cognition, which focuses on how we pay attention to social stimuli in order to make inferences about them in the first place. One of the best understood structures contributing to this process is the amygdala. The process also is dysfunctional in people with autism. Thus, by making comparisons between patients who have lesions of the amygdala and patients with autism, we can obtain some important insights into the neurological underpinnings of autism.