Summary: New study reveals that our brains simplify difficult interpersonal relations by using fundamental mental” building stones” or buttons. Experts scanned the brains of people playing a simple team sport and observed how individuals kept track of relationships with both friends and competitors.
More than monitoring each individual individually, the mind creates reduced patterns that capture the important dynamics of group behavior, especially in the frontal cortex—an area essential for decision-making and interpersonal skills. These findings help clarify how we effectively manage and interpret the continuous flood of interpersonal information encountered regularly.
Important Information:
- Mental Shortcuts: Our brains use reduced cognitive patterns to handle complex social interactions.
- Two Tracking: The head together tracks both specific players and the series of their interactions.
- Prefrontal Cortex Role: Certain brain activity in the cerebral cortex encodes reduced interpersonal interaction patterns.
Origin: UCL
Our brains use standard’ tower blocks ‘ of knowledge to keep track of how individuals interact, enabling us to manage complex social relations, finds a new study led by University College London (UCL ) experts.
For the study, published in , Nature, the scientists scanned the brains of members who were playing a simple sport involving a partner and two competitors, to see how their neurons were able to keep track of information about the team of people.
The scientists found that rather than keeping track of the performance of each individual player, specific parts of the participants ‘ brains would react to specific patterns of interaction, or ‘ building blocks ‘ of information that could be combined to understand what was going on.
Lead author Dr Marco Wittmann (UCL Psychology &, Language Sciences and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research ) said:” Humans are social creatures that are capable of keeping track of highly complex and fluid social dynamics, requiring a massive amount of brain power to remember not only individual people but also the various relationships between them.
” In order to keep up with a group social interaction in real time, our brains must be using heuristics – mental shortcuts that help people make decisions quickly – to compress and simplify the wealth of information involved, with a system that minimises complexity while still allowing flexibility and detail.
” In this research, we found that our brains appear to use a set of basic’ building blocks’ that represent fundamental aspects of social interactions, enabling us to quickly figure out new and complex social situations”.
For the study, the team of scientists from UCL and the University of Oxford used functional magnetic resonance imaging ( fMRI ) to record the brain activity of 88 participants who were playing a simple game.
While in the scanner, the study participants were given a series of information about how they, a partner, and their opponents were faring in a game, and needed to keep track of the information in order to answer a question comparing performances of different players.
Dr Wittmann explained:” We were interested to see whether our brains would use an’ agent-centric’ frame of reference where specific parts of the brain keep track of each player’s performance, or a’ sequential’ frame of reference tracking the information in the order it was received.
” We found that people actually do both, but our brains are able to simplify all of this information into bite-sized chunks.”
The scientists were able to pinpoint specific patterns of activity in the brain that represented a few specific’ building blocks’, each representing a pattern of interaction between the players.
For example, one building block kept information about how well a participant and their partner were doing relative to the other team. A bigger difference in performance between the two teams corresponded to an increase in brain activity related to this building block.
These specific patterns of activity were found in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in decision-making and social behaviour.
The researchers say these fundamental building blocks appear to represent patterns of interaction that are common to many different situations.
Dr Wittmann said:” As we develop social skills in life, our brains are likely learning specific interaction patterns that we come across again and again.
” These patterns may become hard-wired into our brains as building blocks that get assembled and recombined to construct our understanding of any social setting”.
About this social neuroscience research news
Author: Chris Lane
Source: UCL
Contact: Chris Lane – UCL
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
” Basis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial frontal cortex” by Marco Wittmann et al. Nature
Abstract
Basis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial frontal cortex
Navigating social environments is a fundamental challenge for the brain. It has been established that the brain solves this problem, in part, by representing social information in an agent-centric manner, knowledge about others ‘ abilities or attitudes is tagged to individuals such as’ oneself’ or the’ other’.
This intuitive approach has informed the understanding of key nodes in the social parts of the brain, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex ( dmPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).
However, the patterns or combinations in which individuals might interact with one another is as important as the identities of the individuals.
Here, in four studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging, behavioural experiments and a social group decision-making task, we show that the dmPFC and ACC represent the combinatorial possibilities for social interaction afforded by a given situation, and that they do so in a compressed format resembling the basis functions used in spatial, visual and motor domains. The basis functions align with social interaction types, as opposed to individual identities.
Our results indicate that there are deep analogies between abstract neural coding schemes in the visual and motor domain and the construction of our sense of social identity.
