Functional organization of social perception in the human brain

Abstract

Humans can readily perceive a multitude of features from social interactions, but the phenomenological and neural basis of social perception has yet to be solved. Short film clips with rich social content were shown to 97 healthy participants while their haemodynamic brain activity was measured with fMRI. The stimulus clips were annotated for 112 social features yielding the initial stimulus model. Cluster analysis revealed that 13 dimensions were sufficient for describing the social perceptual space. Univariate GLM using these dimensions as predictors was used to map regional neural response profiles to different social features. Multivariate pattern analysis was then utilized to establish the regional specificity of the responses. The results revealed a posterior-anterior gradient in the processing of social information in the brain. Occipital and temporal regions responded to most social dimensions and the classifier revealed that these responses were dimension specific; in contrast Heschl gyri and parietal areas were also broadly tuned to different social signals yet the responses were domain-general and did not differentiate between dimensions. Altogether these results highlight the distributed nature of social processing in the brain as well as the specific contributions of feature-specific versus domain-general social perceptual processes.

Cerebral Topographies of Perceived and Felt Emotions

“…The largest and most generic hub of the neural affective space was the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), which was activated during the perception and experience of most emotions. TPJ is consistently engaged during social perception 42 and has been previously shown to contain emotion-specific gradients also during perceived and experienced emotions 20 . Accordingly, TPJ activation suggests that social information processing is relevant to most emotions evoked by movies.…”

Timing the cerebellum and its connectivity within the social brain

“…Recruitment of the pSTS in facial emotion discrimination has been interpreted as the rapid integration of information derived from changeable aspects of the stimuli (e.g., facial expressions, movements) to attribute social and emotional meaning to faces and thereby understand the intentions of others (Walbrin et al, 2018;Zhu et al, 2013). These operations represent an intermediate step between basic perceptual mechanisms and higher-level social processes (Santavirta et al, 2023;Zhu et al, 2013). While the data from Experiment 2 are consistent with previous evidence regarding the pSTS, the critical finding here is that the posterior cerebellum causally contributes to emotion discrimination within the same time window as the pSTS.…”

Multidimensional neural representations of social features during movie viewing

“…Our findings suggest that the synchronized STS voxel responses may be explained by similar social feature representations across individuals. The STG and MTG have also been implicated in social cognitive processes, including social signal detection, the integration of verbal and non-verbal social cues, extracting social-affective meaning from observed touch, extracting meaning from speech and perceiving social communication and antisocial behavior ( Price, 2012 ; Sugiura et al ., 2014 ; Holler et al ., 2015 ; Lee Masson et al ., 2018 ; Santavirta et al ., 2023 ). These regions show atypical neural responses to social stimuli in neurodiverse conditions, such as autism and schizophrenia ( Zilbovicius et al ., 2006 ; Redcay, 2008 ; Brent et al ., 2014 ; Köchel et al ., 2015 ; He et al ., 2021 ).…”

“…Furthermore, the STS has shown selective neural responses to visually presented social communication ( McMahon et al ., 2023 ) and speech-based social communication ( Landsiedel and Koldewyn, 2023 ). Recent data-driven work has further suggested that communication and antisocial behavior elicit responses in the superior temporal gyrus (STG) and middle temporal gyrus (MTG), respectively ( Santavirta et al ., 2023 ).…”