Summary: New research reveals that the brain simplifies complex social interactions using basic mental “building blocks” or shortcuts. Researchers scanned the brains of people playing a simple team game and observed how participants tracked their interactions with both their teammates and their enemies.
Rather than monitoring each individual individual individually, the brain creates a simplified pattern that captures the essential dynamics of group behavior, especially in the prefrontal cortex. This is an important area for decision-making and social skills. These findings help explain how we manage and interpret the constant flood of social information we encounter every day.
Important Facts:
Brain Shortcuts: Our brains use simplified mental patterns to manage complex social interactions. Double Tracking: The brain tracks both individual players and sequences of interaction simultaneously.
Source: UCL
Our brains discover new research led by researchers at the University of London (UCL) by using basic “building blocks” of information to track how people interact and allow them to navigate complex social interactions.
For a study published in nature, researchers scanned the brains of participants who were playing a simple game involving their teammates and two opponents to see how their brains track information about a group of players.
Rather than tracking the performance of individual players, scientists have found that certain parts of the participant’s brain respond to a specific pattern of interaction, or a “building block” of information that can be combined to understand what is happening.
Lead author, Dr. Marco Whitman (UCL Psychology and Language Sciences and the Research Center for Computational Psychiatry and Aging at the UCL Center for UCL Centre).
“To keep up with the social interactions of groups in real time, our brains must use heuristics (a mental shortcut that helps people make quick decisions) to compress and simplify the information involved, in a system that allows for flexibility and detail while minimizing complexity.
“This study found that our brains appear to use a set of basic ‘building blocks’ that represent fundamental aspects of social interaction, allowing us to quickly grasp new, complex social situations. ”
In this study, a team of scientists from UCL and Oxford University recorded brain activity in 88 participants who were playing a simple game using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
While in the scanner, research participants were given a set of information about how they, their partners and their opponents operate in the game, and had to track the information to answer questions comparing the performance of different players.
Dr. Whitman explained: “I was interested in checking whether the brain would use “agent-centric” reference frames where the brain tracks each player’s performance, or “sequential” reference frames where the brain tracks information in the order it was received.
“We’ve discovered that people actually do both, but our brains can simplify all this information into bite-sized chunks.”
Scientists were able to identify specific patterns of brain activity that represent several specific “building blocks.” Each represents a pattern of interaction between players.
For example, one building block held information about how well participants and their partners were doing in relation to other teams. The significant difference in performance between the two teams corresponded to the increased brain activity associated with this building block.
These specific patterns of activity were seen in the prefrontal cortex involved in decision-making and social behavior.
Researchers say these basic building blocks appear to represent patterns of interaction that are common to many different situations.
Dr. Whitman said:
“These patterns can be strengthened in our brains as building blocks that are assembled and combined to build an understanding of any social environment.”
About this social neuroscience research news
Author: Chris Lane
Source: UCL
Contact: Chris Lane – UCL
Image: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Open access.
“Fundamental Functions of Complex Social Decision in the Dorsal Medial Frontal Cortex,” by Marco Wittman et al. Nature
Abstract
Fundamental functions of complex social decisions in the dorsal medial frontal cortex
Navigating the social environment is a fundamental challenge for the brain. It has been established that the brain partially solves this problem by expressing social information in an agent-centric way. Knowledge of others’ abilities and attitudes is tagged with individuals such as “self” and “other.”
This intuitive approach informs us of understanding of key nodes in the social parts of the brain, dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).
However, the patterns or combinations in which individuals interact with each other are just as important as the individual’s identity.
Here, in four studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging, behavioral experiments, and social group decision-making tasks, we show that DMPFCs and ACCs represent the combinability of social interactions given by a particular situation, and do so in a compressed form similar to the underlying functions used in the spatial, visual and motor domains. The basis functions are consistent with social interaction types, as opposed to individual identities.
Our results show that there is a deep analogy between abstract neural coding schemes in the visual and motor domains and the construction of a sense of social identity.
