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Towards a Conceptual Space of Trust in the Social
Neuroscience of Consciousness
Svenja Pieritz 1,2, Lucas Lorenzo Pena 1,2,
Xerxes D. Arsiwalla 1,2,3 and Paul F.M.J. Verschure 2,3,4
1 SPECS – Institute for Bioengineering Catalonia (IBEC)
2 Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
3 The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST)
4 Institció Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA)
{svenja.pieritz01, lucaslorenzo.pena01}@estudiant.upf.edu
[Introduction/Motivation:]
In bridging the explanatory gap between cognition and neural substrates approaches in understanding
consciousness, there is a need in modelling concepts and their relations as conceptual spaces. Conceptual spaces
help construct a universal state-space of human consciousness [1]. It is argued, the neural substrates responsible
for the perception of another's awareness and attention mechanize a social process, that when directed inward as
a somatosensory process, presumably realizes consciousness [2]. Therefore striving to model conceptual spaces
in the domain of social exchanges, as related to awareness, might pose a means to bridge this gap.
In order to survive within a social game theoretic scenario, an agent needs to estimate expectations of another
agent resulting from processing multimodal information. This perspectival expectation assists the agent in
generating mental models of the world and is realized as confidence. While confidence is firstly needed in
deciding and driving behavior, this metric needs to delegate decisions resulting from this a threshold. Here we
argue this delegation threshold as a component of trust beyond risk-reward, or utility assessment [3], [4].
[Methods:]
Table 1: Results of a meta-study of brain regions connected to trust [5]–[15] showing 5 main functions of brain
circuits activated in trust situations. These findings were clustered into functions supporting of confidence [16]
and valence [17]–[19], respectively within various subdomains. We categorized substrates responsible for
processing mental models, risk assessment, and outcome rewards as confidence [16]. Substrates related to
emotion and social memory are categorized into valence. In social-science, valence is argued to be linked to trust
while accounting for subjective perception within a social space and being specifically defined as emotional
affinity or aversion towards another [17]–[19].
After conducting a meta-study of neural substrates related to trust (Table 1), we propose generalizing trust along
dimensions of confidence, and valence (Figure 1). Furthermore, we include accuracy as being an objective
measure of how well one’s mental model describes the world [20].
[Results and Discussion:]
We construct a conceptual space of trust as defined by three dimensions: confidence (C), valence (V), and
accuracy (A), each with their respective gradients: high (+) and low (-). We hypothesize the concept of trust into
five instantiations: Trust, Distrust, Mistrust, Mis-distrust, and Untrust (Figure 1). Trust as willingness to make
oneself vulnerable [21] and subjective probability by which another will perform an action which outcome will
result in positive utility.(+C, +V, +A). Distrust as willingness to not make oneself vulnerable and subjective
probability by which another will perform an action which outcome will result in negative utility [22] (+C, -V,
+A). Mistrust as a measure misplaced trust [22] (+C, +V, -A). Mis-distrust as a measure of misplaced mistrust
(+C, -V, -A). Untrust as unwillingness to make decisions about both vulnerability and to create expectations of
another’s actions (-C, -V, -A).
Figure 1: A Conceptual Space of Trust
Thus, by proposing a concrete definition through this conceptual space, we lay the foundational framework that
might support a cognitive model of trust. We are conducting pilot studies of a modified version of a dyadic trust
game where we introduce emotional priming to influence valence, report accuracy and measure confidence in
order to compare positioning within this conceptual space. In summary, this data might validate among possible
socio-economic models of trust, which can be tested within more complex social ecological validity scenarios. A
cognitive theory of trust might also play a significant role in aiding cognitive architectures to construct mental
models of a socially dynamic world. Distributed Adaptive Control (DAC) is such a cognitive architecture, which
aims at realizing the Who, What, Where, Why and How (H5W) of a social agent [23]. Our model, when placed
in multi-agent interactions driven by DAC and subsequently H5W, might support the variability expressed in
social agent interactions which reside outside of classical game theoretic interactions and yet still be biologically
grounded.
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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1701), 20150448.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0448
