On the relationship of online and offline social cognition

Social neuroscience studies the neurobiological underpinnings of people making sense of people. Due to both conceptual and methodological constraints, the majority of studies in this field of research, however, has employed experimental paradigms that focus on social cognition from an observer’s rather than from an interactor’s point of view (offline vs. online social cognition). This calls for an increased effort to systematically investigate the neural bases of participation in real-time social interaction. In light of the ontogenetic primacy of social interaction over observation and the idea that neural networks established during social interaction may be “re-used” during observation, other important objectives of the field will be to relate new findings into the neural bases of social interaction to previous work investigating the neural bases of social observation as well as to find ways to directly compare the two.