Multidimensional neural representations of social features during movie viewing.

Masson, Haemy Lee; Chang, Lucy; Isik, Leyla

Abstract

The social world is dynamic and contextually embedded. Yet, most studies utilize simple stimuli that do not capture the complexity of everyday social episodes. To address this, we implemented a movie viewing paradigm and investigated how the everyday social episodes are processed in the brain. Participants watched one of two movies during an MRI scan. Neural patterns from brain regions involved in social perception, mentalization, action observation, and sensory processing were extracted. Representational similarity analysis results revealed that several labeled social features (including social interaction, mentalization, the actions of others, characters talking about themselves, talking about others, and talking about objects) were represented in superior temporal gyrus (STG) and middle temporal gyrus (MTG). The mentalization feature was also represented throughout the theory of mind network, and characters talking about others engaged the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), suggesting that listeners may spontaneously infer the mental state of those being talked about. In contrast, we did not observe the action representations in frontoparietal regions of the action observation network. The current findings indicate that STG and MTG serve as key regions for social processing, and that listening to characters talk about others elicits spontaneous mental state inference in TPJ during natural movie viewing.

Citation

Masson, H. L., Chang, L., & Isik, L. (2024). Multidimensional neural representations of social features during movie viewing. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 19(1), Article nsae030. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsae030

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 3, 2024
• Online Publication Date: May 9, 2024
• Publication Date: May 9, 2024
• Deposit Date: May 28, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: May 28, 2024
• Journal: Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
• Print ISSN: 1749-5016
• Electronic ISSN: 1749-5024
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 19
• Issue: 1
• Article Number: nsae030
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsae030
• Keywords: Theory of mind, Representational similarity analysis, Naturalistic fMRI, Action observation, Social interaction perception, Social communication
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2465853