Trends in social neuroscience: from biological motion to joint actions

It has been argued that our social nature represents what makes us human. Social neuroscience aims at exploring biological basis of social cognition, interested in how social behaviour and context can influence short-term and long-term brain functioning and how the brain functioning can foster, create social behaviour, and actively process social context. This paper focuses on the recent progress in social perception and cognition by a neuropsychological point of view, and opens some questions. After a brief introduction on social neuroscience development and on neural correlates that have been associated to social-related functions, we will outline biological motion and joint action topics, highlighting the evolutionary course that links them.