True and false memories for social interactions: Neural correlates of differential encoding processes

NeuroImage ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. S76
Author(s):  
B. Straube ◽  
A. Green ◽  
A. Chatterjee ◽  
T. Kircher
2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 306-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Straube ◽  
Antonia Green ◽  
Anjan Chatterjee ◽  
Tilo Kircher

In social situations, we encounter information transferred in firsthand (egocentric) and secondhand (allocentric) communication contexts. However, the mechanism by which an individual distinguishes whether a past interaction occurred in an egocentric versus allocentric situation is poorly understood. This study examined the neural bases for encoding memories of social interactions through experimentally manipulating the communication context. During fMRI data acquisition, participants watched video clips of an actor speaking and gesturing directly toward them (egocentric context) or toward an unseen third person (allocentric context). After scanning, a recognition task gauged participants' ability to recognize the sentences they had just seen and to recall the context in which the sentences had been spoken. We found no differences between the recognition of sentences spoken in egocentric and allocentric contexts. However, when asked about the communication context (“Had the actor directly spoken to you?”), participants tended to believe falsely that the actor had directly spoken to them during allocentric conditions. Greater activity in the hippocampus was related to correct context memory, whereas the ventral ACC was activated for subsequent inaccurate context memory. For the interaction between encoding context and context memory, we observed increased activation for egocentric remembered items in the bilateral and medial frontal cortex, the BG, and the left parietal and temporal lobe. Our data indicate that memories of social interactions are biased to be remembered egocentrically. Self-referential encoding processes reflected in increased frontal activation and decreased hippocampal activation might be the basis of correct item but false context memory of social interactions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (38) ◽  
pp. 10149-10154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Harpaz ◽  
Gašper Tkačik ◽  
Elad Schneidman

Individual computations and social interactions underlying collective behavior in groups of animals are of great ethological, behavioral, and theoretical interest. While complex individual behaviors have successfully been parsed into small dictionaries of stereotyped behavioral modes, studies of collective behavior largely ignored these findings; instead, their focus was on inferring single, mode-independent social interaction rules that reproduced macroscopic and often qualitative features of group behavior. Here, we bring these two approaches together to predict individual swimming patterns of adult zebrafish in a group. We show that fish alternate between an “active” mode, in which they are sensitive to the swimming patterns of conspecifics, and a “passive” mode, where they ignore them. Using a model that accounts for these two modes explicitly, we predict behaviors of individual fish with high accuracy, outperforming previous approaches that assumed a single continuous computation by individuals and simple metric or topological weighing of neighbors’ behavior. At the group level, switching between active and passive modes is uncorrelated among fish, but correlated directional swimming behavior still emerges. Our quantitative approach for studying complex, multimodal individual behavior jointly with emergent group behavior is readily extensible to additional behavioral modes and their neural correlates as well as to other species.


2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 475-493
Author(s):  
Catherine J. Stoodley ◽  
Peter T. Tsai

Social interactions involve processes ranging from face recognition to understanding others’ intentions. To guide appropriate behavior in a given context, social interactions rely on accurately predicting the outcomes of one's actions and the thoughts of others. Because social interactions are inherently dynamic, these predictions must be continuously adapted. The neural correlates of social processing have largely focused on emotion, mentalizing, and reward networks, without integration of systems involved in prediction. The cerebellum forms predictive models to calibrate movements and adapt them to changing situations, and cerebellar predictive modeling is thought to extend to nonmotor behaviors. Primary cerebellar dysfunction can produce social deficits, and atypical cerebellar structure and function are reported in autism, which is characterized by social communication challenges and atypical predictive processing. We examine the evidence that cerebellar-mediated predictions and adaptation play important roles in social processes and argue that disruptions in these processes contribute to autism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Leslie ◽  
Daniel Halls ◽  
Jenni Leppanen ◽  
Felicity Sedgewick ◽  
Katherine Smith ◽  
...  

People with anorexia nervosa (AN) commonly exhibit social difficulties, which may be related to problems with understanding the perspectives of others, commonly known as Theory of Mind (ToM) processing. However, there is a dearth of literature investigating the neural basis of these differences in ToM and at what age they emerge. This study aimed to test for differences in the neural correlates of ToM processes in young women with AN, and young women weight-restored (WR) from AN, as compared to healthy control participants (HC). Based on previous findings in AN, we hypothesized that young women with current or prior AN, as compared to HCs, would exhibit a reduced neural response in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), the inferior frontal gyrus, and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) whilst completing a ToM task. We recruited 73 young women with AN, 45 WR young women, and 70 young women without a history of AN to take part in the current study. Whilst undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan, participants completed the Frith-Happé task, which is a commonly used measure of ToM with demonstrated reliability and validity in adult populations. In this task, participants viewed the movements of triangles, which depicted either action movements, simple interactions, or complex social interactions. Viewing trials with more complex social interactions in the Frith-Happé task was associated with increased brain activation in regions including the right TPJ, the bilateral mPFC, the cerebellum, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. There were no group differences in neural activation in response to the ToM contrast. Overall, these results suggest that the neural basis of spontaneous mentalizing is preserved in most young women with AN.


2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (S2) ◽  
pp. 2111-2111
Author(s):  
T. Kicher

The term social cognition comprises of the perception and cognitive processing of stimuli of the social environment that is necessary to understand one's own behaviour and that of others. Social cognition is important for conscious and unconscious behaviour in social interactions and is composed of the recognition and interpretation of emotions in faces, body language and speech, reflection of one's own mental state and intentions as well as the realization of others’ intentions, thoughts and feelings. The mirror neuron system is involved in empathetic processes. Several aspects of the neural correlates of social interaction, embodiment and the mirror neuron system in schizophrenia and autism will be reported.


2014 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 85-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathilde Ménoret ◽  
Léo Varnet ◽  
Raphaël Fargier ◽  
Anne Cheylus ◽  
Aurore Curie ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marieke K. van Vugt ◽  
Joshua Pollock ◽  
Bryce Johnson ◽  
Kalden Gyatso ◽  
Ngawang Norbu ◽  
...  

Objectives: Although mindfulness meditation is the familiar and researched form of mental training derived from Buddhism, it represents but one form of practice. Monastic debate is an interactive and dyadic analytical meditation practice that originates from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition where monastics seek to jointly deepen their understanding of complicated philosophical issues. To date, monastic debate and analytic meditation have yet to be examined in the context of scientific investigation. Methods: In the current study, we examined the neural correlates of this analytical meditation practice by means of hyperscanning electroencephalography, a method well-suited for examining social interactions. Results: Consistent with the idea that analytical meditation helps to train concentration, we observed that over the course of the debate, mid-frontal theta oscillations—a correlate of absorption—increased significantly. This increase was stronger for more experienced monks as compared to monks at the beginning of their education. In addition, we found evidence for increases in synchrony in frontal alpha oscillations between paired debaters during moments of agreement as compared to disagreement on a set of premises. Conclusions: Together, these findings provide an initial understanding of Tibetan monastic debate and analytical meditation using neuroscientific methods.


2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (11) ◽  
pp. 1728-1736 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Jessen ◽  
Tobias Grossmann

Face evaluation is a key aspect of face processing in humans, serving important functions in regulating social interactions. Adults and preschool children readily evaluate faces with respect to a person's trustworthiness and dominance. However, it is unclear whether face evaluation is mainly a product of extensive learning or a foundational building block of face perception already during infancy. We examined infants' sensitivity to facial signs of trustworthiness (Experiment 1) and dominance (Experiment 2) by measuring ERPs and looking behavior in response to faces that varied with respect to the two facial attributes. Results revealed that 7-month-old infants are sensitive to facial signs of trustworthiness but not dominance. This sensitivity was reflected in infants' behavioral preference and in the modulation of brain responses previously linked to emotion detection from faces. These findings provide first evidence that processing faces with respect to trustworthiness has its origins in infancy and shed light on the behavioral and neural correlates of this early emerging sensitivity.


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