Does our brain use the same policy for interacting with people and manipulating different objects?

Abstract

Our first impression of other people is greatly affected by our previous experiences. Schematic processing, proposed in social psychology, explains our behavior in interacting with other people. It suggests existence of different schemas in our brain for different groups of people, e.g., extroverts, introverts, shy, women, men, etc. and also schemas related to special people like our parents, close friends, supervisor, and even ourselves. Each schema is recalled when we meet the corresponding person/personality (Atkinson, 1996). On the other hand there is a relatively well accepted theory–model based theory- in motor control and learning studies (Daw and Dayan, 2014; Dayan and Berridge, 2014). It suggests existence of some internal models (forward and/or inverse) in the brain which help us for planning and execution of the actions. Although these two viewpoints may seem very distinct, there are some interesting similarities between them, which are explained in the following section. I hypothesize that these correspondences may suggest that the brain employs same algorithms in dealing with both situations. Understanding the brain function is a great challenge for many scientists. Further evaluation of the proposed hypothesis may be helpful to achieve better understanding of the brain function, as advances in each field may encourage new ideas in the other one. In the following sections each of the two viewpoints and then their similarities are explained.