Neural Trajectories of Conceptually Related Events.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Social Psychology

Background:

• Meaning often arises from sequences of events, not isolated incidents.
• Understanding how the brain tracks these conceptual trajectories, especially social relationships, is crucial.

Approach:

• Participants engaged in a narrative social interaction game during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
• Simulated social relationships were modeled as trajectories in an affiliation and power space.
• Hippocampal activity was analyzed to identify neural patterns tracking these relationships.

Key Points:

• Individual social relationships were uniquely tracked by sequences of hippocampal states.
• Neural states reflected accumulated affiliation and power dynamics within each relationship.
• Each relationship exhibited its own distinct neural trajectory within a shared manifold.

Conclusions:

• The hippocampus represents social relationships via ordered sequences of low-dimensional neural patterns.
• The complexity of these neural patterns correlates with real-world social network size.
• Evolving social relationships are neurally encoded as trajectory-like patterns.