Brain matters…in social sciences

Here we offer a general introduction to cognitive neuroscience and provide examples relevant to psychology, healthcare and bioethics, law and criminology, information studies, of how brain studies have influenced, are influencing or show the potential to influence the social sciences. We argue that social scientists should read, and be enabled to understand, primary sources of evidence in cognitive neuroscience. We encourage cognitive neuroscientists to reflect upon the resonance that their work may have across the social sciences and to facilitate a mutually enriching interdisciplinary dialogue.

Do you what I say? people reconstruct the syntax of anomalous utterances

We frequently experience and successfully process anomalous utterances. Here we examine whether people do this by ‘correcting’ syntactic anomalies to yield well-formed representations. In two structural priming experiments, participants’ syntactic choices in picture description were influenced as strongly by previously comprehended anomalous (missing-verb) prime sentences as by well-formed prime sentences. Our results suggest that comprehenders can reconstruct the constituent structure of anomalous utterances – even when such utterances lack a major structural component such as the verb. These results also imply that structural alignment in dialogue is unaffected if one interlocutor produces anomalous utterances.

Do children copy an expert or a majority? Examining selective learning in instrumental and normative contexts

This study examined whether instrumental and normative learning contexts differentially influence 4- to 7-year-old children’s social learning strategies; specifically, their dispositions to copy an expert versus a majority consensus. Experiment 1 (N = 44) established that children copied a relatively competent “expert” individual over an incompetent individual in both kinds of learning context. In experiment 2 (N = 80) we then tested whether children would copy a competent individual versus a majority, in each of the two different learning contexts. Results showed that individual children differed in strategy, preferring with significant consistency across two different test trials to copy either the competent individual or the majority. This study is the first to show that children prefer to copy more competent individuals when shown competing methods of achieving an instrumental goal (Experiment 1) and provides new evidence that children, at least in our “individualist” culture, may consistently express either a competency or majority bias in learning both instrumental and normative information (Experiment 2). This effect was similar in the instrumental and normative learning contexts we applied.

Missing women: policing absence

This paper considers the neglected mobilities associated with a sample of UK women reported as missing.Refracted through literatures on gendered mobility and abandonment, the paper argues that the journeys of thesewomen in crisis are not well understood by police services, and that normative gender relations may infuse theirmanagement. By selectively exploring one illustrative police case file on Kim, we highlight how reported andobserved socio-spatial relationships within private and public spaces relate to search actions. We argue that Kim’smobility and spatial experiences are barely understood, except for when they appear to symbolise disorder anddanger. We address the silences in this singular case by using the voices of other women reported as missing, ascollected in a research project to explore the agency, experience and meaning of female mobility during absence.We argue that women reported as missing are not abandoned by UK policing services, but that a policy ofcontinued search for them may be at risk if they repeatedly contravene normative socio-spatial relationshipsthrough regular absence mobilities. By way of conclusion, we address recent calls for research that explores therelationships between gender and mobility.