Exploring the Neural Correlates of Social Stereotyping

Quadflieg, Susanne; Turk, David J.; Waiter, Gordon D.; Mitchell, James; Jenkins, Adrianna C.; Macrae, C. Neil

doi:10.1162/jocn.2009.21091

Cited by 75 publications

(82 citation statements)

References 71 publications

(100 reference statements)

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“…However, this research gap is growing smaller. For example, recent reports have started to shed light on which brain regions represent stereotypes and other forms of semantic knowledge about social groups (Contreras et al, 2012;Quadflieg et al, 2009). Given the importance of groups to our everyday life as social animals, this burgeoning interest in the neural basis of intergroup cognition promises to become an important program of research in cognitive neuroscience.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Common Brain Regions with Distinct Patterns of Neural Responses during Mentalizing about Groups and Individuals

Contreras¹,

Schirmer²,

Banaji³

et al. 2013

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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Abstract■ An individual has a mind; a group does not. Yet humans routinely endow groups with mental states irreducible to any of their members (e.g., "scientists hope to understand every aspect of nature"). But are these mental states categorically similar to those we attribute to individuals? In two fMRI experiments, we tested this question against a set of brain regions that are consistently associated with social cognition-medial pFC, anterior temporal lobe, TPJ, and medial parietal cortex. Participants alternately answered questions about the mental states and physical attributes of individual people and groups. Regions previously associated with mentalizing about individuals were also robustly responsive to judgments of groups, suggesting that perceivers deploy the same social-cognitive processes when thinking about the mind of an individual and the "mind" of a group. However, multivariate searchlight analysis revealed that several of these regions showed distinct multivoxel patterns of response to groups and individual people, suggesting that perceivers maintain distinct representations of groups and individuals during mental state inferences. These findings suggest that perceivers mentalize about groups in a manner qualitatively similar to mentalizing about individual people, but that the brain nevertheless maintains important distinctions between the representations of such entities. ■

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Common Brain Regions with Distinct Patterns of Neural Responses during Mentalizing about Groups and Individuals

Contreras¹,

Schirmer²,

Banaji³

et al. 2013

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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“…For all contrasts, in order to obtain results that are corrected for multiple comparisons, we used Monte Carlo simulations (https://www2.bc.edu/sd-slotnick/scripts.htm) to define individual voxel and cluster extent thresholds (e.g., Forman et al (1995), Garoff-Eaton et al (2007), Quadflieg et al (2008) and Slotnick and Schacter (2004)). This procedure takes into account the acquisition matrix (64 Â 64), number of slices (34), voxel dimensions (3.8 mm 3 ), intrinsic smoothness (16.1 mm), and resampling of voxels (none) in order to simulate data and estimate the rate of Type I error given the protocol parameters over 10,000 iterations.…”

Section: Fmri Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age differences in the neural correlates of novelty processing: The effects of item-relatedness

Bowman

Dennis

2015

Brain Research

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Past research finds that age-related increases in false recognitions are a key contributor to age-related memory decline, suggesting that older adults have difficulty in correctly distinguishing between new and old information, particularly when new items at retrieval are semantically or perceptually related to items from encoding. However, little work has examined the neural mechanisms older adults engage to avoid false recognitions and successfully identify information as novel. In the present study, young and older adults were scanned during a retrieval task in which new items were exemplars from studied categories (related lures) or unstudied categories (unrelated lures) in order to detect age-related differences in the neural correlates of related and unrelated novelty processing. Results showed that, unlike young adults, older adults did not differentially recruit regions such as the anterior cingulate and bilateral middle/inferior temporal gyrus to capitalize on the salient categorical differences in unrelated items. Likewise, older adults did not differentially recruit regions of early visual cortex or anterior hippocampus, suggesting that older adults have difficulty using item-specific details to make successful related novelty decisions. Instead, older adults recruited bilateral ventrolateral prefrontal cortex differentially for successful novelty processing and particularly for related novelty processing. Overall, results suggest that age deficits in novelty processing may arise because older adults process related and unrelated lures similarly and do not capitalize on categorical or item-specific properties of novel items. Similar to aging patterns in memory retrieval, results also showed that older adults have the strongest novelty success activity in lateral PFC regions associated with control and monitoring processes. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled SI: Memory & Aging.

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“…Several regions repeatedly shown to be important for social cognition and stereotyping would be likely to be involved, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Greater activation is observed in the mPFC during tasks that would access stereotypic content, and when stereotypes govern judgments (Knutson et al, 2007;Mitchell et al, 2009Mitchell et al, , 2005Quadflieg et al, 2009). Research utilizing diverse techniques (Beer et al, 2008;Gehring et al, 1993;Niki and Watanabe, 1979;Pardo et al, 1990) has long converged on the ACC's role in conflict monitoring, as it is readily activated by situations during which multiple responses compete (Botvinick et al, 2001).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%