Neural Representations of Belief Concepts: A Representational Similarity Approach to Social Semantics

Abstract

The present experiment identified neural regions that represent a class of concepts that are independent of perceptual or sensory attributes. During functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning, participants viewed names of social groups (e.g. Atheists, Evangelicals, and Economists) and performed a one-back similarity judgment according to 1 of 2 dimensions of belief attributes: political orientation (Liberal to Conservative) or spiritualism (Spiritualist to Materialist). By generalizing across a wide variety of social groups that possess these beliefs, these attribute concepts did not coincide with any specific sensory quality, allowing us to target conceptual, rather than perceptual, representations. Multi-voxel pattern searchlight analysis was used to identify regions in which activation patterns distinguished the 2 ends of both dimensions: Conservative from Liberal social groups when participants focused on the political orientation dimension, and spiritual from Materialist groups when participants focused on the spiritualism dimension. A cluster in right precuneus exhibited such a pattern, indicating that it carries information about belief-attribute concepts and forms part of semantic memory—perhaps a component particularly concerned with psychological traits. This region did not overlap with the theory of mind network, which engaged nearby, but distinct, parts of precuneus. These findings have implications for the neural organization of conceptual knowledge, especially the understanding of social groups.

Brain coding of social network structure

“…A similar convergence of social and spatial information has also been shown in the lateral parietal cortex (Parkinson et al, 2014) and in the medial temporal lobe (Tavares et al, 2015). Additional studies of the medial parietal lobe have demonstrated that it represents relations between social group categories (Leshinskaya et al, 2017) and across events in time (Baldassano et al, 2017). Our findings here strengthen the idea that the brain's spatial processing system has a domain-general role, and is involved in mapping knowledge across space, time and the social domain (Arzy and Schacter, 2019;Behrens et al, 2018;Bellmund et al, 2018;Constantinescu et al, 2016;Epstein et al, 2017;Wheatley, 2013, 2015;Parkinson et al, 2014;Peer et al, 2015;Schafer and Schiller, 2018;Tavares et al, 2015).…”

Social Semantics: The role of conceptual knowledge and cognitive control in a neurobiological model of the social brain

“…These observations have prompted several research groups to propose that the ATL plays a domain-specific role in the representation of social knowledge, including person knowledge, emotions, and other more abstract social concepts (Olson et al, 2013;Thompson et al, 2003;Zahn et al, 2007). See Leshinskaya et al (2017) for a discussion regarding a possible role of a non-ATL region in social conceptual representation.…”

Religious Belief and Cognitive Conflict Sensitivity: A Preregistered fMRI Study

“…For instance, the use of multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) may provide insight into the representational nature of religious concepts endorsed by believers; a question could be whether the neural representations of religious agents such as 'God', 'angels', or 'Satan' are more similar to real people such as 'Napoleon' and 'Donald Trump' or to imaginary agents such as 'Santa Claus' and 'Superman' (cf. Leshinskaya, Contreras, Caramazza, & Mitchell, 2017).…”