Dimitris Bolis

Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia | IIT

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...

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our s...

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...

That psychological sciences suffer from a profound crisis is probably not extremely controversial. Yet, arguably, the recently debated replication failure is nothing but a symptom of deeply rooted dichotomies and ontological commitments lying at its core. Undeniably, essential aspects of the human condition are typically studied in isolation via ap...

In this article, we analyse social interactions, drawing on diverse points of views, ranging from dialectics, second-person neuroscience and enactivism to dynamical systems, active inference and machine learning. To this end, we define interpersonal attunement as a set of multi-scale processes of building up and materializing social expectations—pu...

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, without involving any real-time social interaction. With the emergence of second-person neuroscience, investigators have uncovered the unique complex...

A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stanc...

In this paper, 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 play a crucial role in shaping the boundaries of the s...

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 beha...

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 soc...

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 beha...

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...

Psychiatric disorders are ubiquitously characterized by debilitating social impairments. These difficulties are thought to emerge from aberrant social inference. In order to elucidate the underlying computational mechanisms, patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder (N = 29), schizophrenia (N = 31), and borderline personality disorder (N =...

Thinking through other minds 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-through to becoming-with, we suggest complementing such an account by focusing on the empirical, computational, a...

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 conc...

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 conc...

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...

In their thought-provoking and integrative target article Fotopoulou and Tsakiris cut across different bodies of literature to argue for a second-person account of interoception and social cognition. More specifically, they argue for the constitutive role of embodied social interactions in the development of interoceptive abilities and the ability...

Autism is a developmental condition, characterized by difficulties of social interaction and communication, as well as restricted interests and repetitive behaviors. Although several important conceptions have shed light on specific facets, there is still no consensus about a universal yet specific theory in terms of its underlying mechanisms. Whil...

Social deficits are a core symptom of autism spectrum disorder; however, the perturbed neural mechanisms underpinning these deficits remain unclear. It has been suggested that social prediction errors—coding discrepancies between the predicted and actual outcome of another’s decisions—might play a crucial role in processing social information. Whil...

Due to methodological and conceptual constraints, neuropsychiatric research has largely focused on the individual. Here, we consider ‘psychopathology’ not merely as disordered function within single brains, but as misaligned communication between people as well. Drawing on predictive coding and dialectics we put forward the dialectical misattunemen...

Here, primarily leaning on sociocultural-historical theories and predictive coding we attempt to revisit psychological and psychiatric definitions through a dialectical prism. More specifically, we emphasize on viewing human condition, not as a static one driven by linear causality, but rather as the outcome of a dialectical interplay of multiple a...

One of the cardinal and unique features of Autism (ASD) is their difficulty in understanding the mental states of others (Theory of Mind; ToM). Despite numerous behavioural and neuroimaging investigations, it is as yet unclear why individuals with ASD tend to struggle with this task, however, a computational approach may provide greater insight1. I...

It has been suggested that the computational and neural mechanisms that underpin ToM may be similar to those that underpin first-person Reinforcement Learning (RL), i.e. unexpected decision-making outcomes (false beliefs) constitute prediction errors (PE) that activate neurons in regions such as the Middle Cingulate Cortex (MCC). Here, we present a...

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 pre- and post- processing steps are studied for our goal of thalamic nuclei...

In this paper, the robustness of appearance-based subspace learning techniques in geometrical transformations of the images is explored. A number of such techniques are presented and tested using four facial expression databases. A strong correlation between the recognition accuracy and the image registration error has been observed. Although it is...

In this paper, the robustness of appearance-based, subspace learning techniques for facial expression recognition in geometrical transformations is explored. A plethora of facial expression recognition algorithms is presented and tested using three well-known facial expression databases. Although, it is common-knowledge that appearance based method...

A novel educational environment for kids with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs), namely NOESIS, is presented in this paper. NOESIS takes into account ASD kidspsila individual characteristics (level of autism, source sensitivity, reaction target, etc), their emotional state (stress level, hyper-/hypo-tension) during their educational procedure, and...