Abstract
Correctly identifying friends and foes is integral to successful group living. Here, we use repetition suppression to examine the neural circuitry underlying generalized group categorization—the process of categorizing in-group and out-group members across multiple social categories. Participants assigned to an arbitrary team (i.e., Eagles or Rattlers) underwent fMRI while categorizing political and arbitrary in-group and out-group members. We found that frontoparietal control network exhibited repetition suppression in response to “identical in-group” (Democrat-Democrat or Eagles-Eagles) and “different in-group” (Eagles-Democrat or Democrat-Eagles) trials relative to “out-group/in-group trials” (Republican-Democrat or Rattler-Eagles). Specifically, the repetition suppression contrast map included bilateral superior parietal lobule, bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and bilateral middle temporal gyrus. Participants who reported an increased tendency to join and value their social groups exhibited decreased repetition suppression in bilateral DLPFC. Comparison of our whole-brain repetition suppression map with an independently identified map of frontoparietal control network revealed 34.3% overlap. Social categorization requires recognizing both a target’s group membership but also the target’s orientation toward one’s self. Fittingly, we find that generalized social categorization engages a network that acts as a functional bridge between dorsal attentional (exogenously-oriented) and default mode (internally-oriented) networks.
Highlights
Rather than relying on vMPFC/pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pgACC), it is possible that generalized social categorization tracks targets’ functional significance, and draws on domain-general circuitry associated with goal-directed information integration[45, 46]
We used a repetition suppression paradigm to examine the neural substrates of the process of categorizing others as in-group members across multiple social categories
A network roughly corresponding to the frontoparietal control network (FPCN) exhibited repetition suppression in response to repeated in-group trials
Summary
Several neuroimaging studies have attempted to identify an overlap between the brain regions implicated in self-referential processes and the categorization of in-group members. Rather than relying on an analysis that prioritizes similarity to oneself, another process through which people may categorize others as in-group members is by inferring the functional relations between one’s self and the target (e.g., “Are you with me or against me?”)[43].
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