Encoding-Specific Effects of Social Cognition on the Neural Correlates of Subsequent Memory

Abstract

To examine whether social cognition recruits distinct mental operations, we measured brain activity during social ("form an impression of this person") and relatively nonsocial ("remember the order in which person information is presented") orienting tasks. Extending previous research on the neural basis of social cognition, the impression formation task differentially engaged an extensive region of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (PFC). In contrast, the nonsocial sequencing task differentially engaged the superior frontal and parietal gyri, precentral gyrus, and the caudate. In addition, we compared encoding activations for subsequently remembered (i.e., hits) to subsequently forgotten (i.e., misses) items. The brain regions in which the blood oxygenation level-dependent signal distinguished subsequent hits from subsequent misses depended on which orienting task was performed at encoding: subsequent memory was correlated with encoding activity only in the medial PFC for impression formation trials but in the right hippocampus for sequencing trials. These data inform two interrelated cognitive issues. First, results underscore the neuroanatomical distinctiveness of social cognition and suggest that previous psychological theories may have neglected important functional differences in how the human brain instantiates social and nonsocial cognitive processes. Second, by demonstrating that activity in different brain regions correlates with subsequent memory as a function of the orienting task performed at encoding, these data provide evidence of the neural basis for encoding specificity, the principle that memory is critically determined by the cognitive process engaged by the initial study episode.

Aging, self-referencing, and medial prefrontal cortex

“…As illustrated in Figure 5, the region of medial prefrontal cortex (BA 32) is superior to the self-reference activity displayed in Figure 3, but is consistent with previous reports of the involvement of dorsal medial prefrontal cortex in self-referential processes (Mitchell, Macrae, & Banaji, 2004;Mitchell et al, 2005). As displayed in Figure 5, the age groups differ in their response to items judged in reference to the self, with elderly activating strongly to positive but not negative items, while young activate somewhat more for negative than positive items.…”

“…Although we suggest that emotion generally is incidental to the task, previous studies identify dorsal medial prefrontal activation during impression formation (Mitchell et al, 2004;Mitchell et al, 2005). Taken together with our finding, the activity of the region may reflect evaluative components that are more salient for older adults, but only during selfreferencing.…”

An fMRI study of violations of social expectations: When people are not who we expect them to be

“…The TPJ, frequently bilaterally, is consistently involved in tasks requiring the attribution of mental states to social targets (Saxe & Wexler, 2005;Saxe, 2006;Spreng, Mar, & Kim, 2008) and damage to this brain area has been shown to impair performance on Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks (Samson, Apperly, & Humphreys, 2004). The MPFC is also central to many social cognitive processes (Amodio & Frith, 2006), including those supporting impression formation (Mitchell, Macrae, & Banaji, 2004), ToM and the perception of faces for which person-knowledge is available (Cloutier, Kelley, & Heatherton, 2011;Todorov, Gobbini, Evans, & Haxby, 2007). Accordingly, preferential involvement of the TPJ and MPFC for incongruent social targets provides additional evidence in support of person perception models positing the frequent necessity to individuate targets violating social expectations (Brewer, 1988;Fiske & Neuberg, 1990;Macrae et al, 1999).…”

Familial covariation of facial emotion recognition and IQ in schizophrenia

“…Neuroimaging and lesion studies have shown that social tasks activate specific brain areas that can be distinguished from those activated by non-social tasks, for example superior temporal sulcus, medial prefrontal cortex (Adolphs, 2001;Harris et al, 2005;Mitchell et al, 2004), amygdala, fusiform gyrus and insular regions (Bar-On R et al, 2003). Consecutively, the MATRICS-NIMH consensus cognitive battery for schizophrenia categorized social cognition as one of the seven major separate cognitive domains that are altered in schizophrenia, alongside with: Speed of Processing, Attention/vigilance, Working Memory, Verbal Learning and Memory, Visual learning and Memory and Reasoning and Problem Solving (Green et al, 2004).…”