How does the brain navigate knowledge of social relations? Testing for shared neural mechanisms for shifting attention in space and social knowledge

Abstract

How does the human brain support reasoning about social relations (e.g., social status, friendships)? Converging theories suggest that navigating knowledge of social relations may co-opt neural circuitry with evolutionarily older functions (e.g., shifting attention in space). Here, we analyzed multivoxel response patterns of fMRI data to examine the neural mechanisms for shifting attention in knowledge of a social hierarchy. The “directions” in which participants mentally navigated social knowledge were encoded in multivoxel patterns in superior parietal cortex, which also encoded directions of attentional shifts in space. Exploratory analyses implicated additional regions of posterior parietal and occipital cortex in encoding analogous mental operations in space and social knowledge. However, cross-domain analyses suggested that attentional shifts in space and social knowledge are likely encoded in functionally independent response patterns. Additionally, cross-participant multivoxel pattern similarity analyses indicated that “directions'' of mental navigation in social knowledge are signaled consistently across participants and across different social hierarchies in a set of brain regions, including the right superior parietal lobule. Taken together, these results elucidate the neural basis of navigating abstract knowledge of social relations, and its connection to more basic mental operations.