According to a recent study conducted by researchers at University College London (UCL), our brains use fundamental “building blocks” of information to track how people interact, allowing us to navigate complex social interactions. Researchers scanned the brains of participants playing a straightforward game with two opponents and a teammate to see how well their brains tracked information about the group of players. The study was published in Nature.

Instead of recording each player’s performance, the researchers discovered that certain brain regions would respond to particular interaction patterns, or “building blocks” of data that could be put together to comprehend what was happening. Being social beings, humans can maintain track of extremely intricate and dynamic social dynamics. This requires a tremendous amount of mental capacity to recall not only specific individuals but also the different connections among them.

Our brains must use heuristics, or mental shortcuts that speed up decision-making, to condense and simplify the abundance of information involved in a group social interaction in real-time. This system should minimize complexity while retaining flexibility and detail. According to this study, our brains seem to employ a set of fundamental “building blocks” that reflect essential elements of social interactions, which helps us quickly understand novel and challenging social situations.

The study’s team of researchers from UCL and the University of Oxford recorded the brain activity of 88 participants while they played a basic game using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). To respond to a question comparing the performances of various players, the study participants had to keep track of a series of data regarding their own, their partners, and their opponents’ performance during the scan. Dr. Wittmann clarified: We wanted to know if our brains would employ a “sequential” frame of reference, which tracks the information in the order it was received, or an “agent-centric” frame of reference, in which particular brain regions monitor each player’s performance. Although we discovered that people do both, our brains can condense all of this information into manageable chunks.

The researchers were able to identify particular brain activity patterns that corresponded to a few distinct “building blocks,” each of which represented a pattern of player interaction. One building block, for instance, recorded data on how well a participant and their partner were performing in comparison to the opposing team. An increase in brain activity associated with this building block was correlated with a greater performance gap between the two teams. These particular activity patterns were discovered in the prefrontal cortex, a region involved in social behavior and decision-making.

According to the researchers, these basic building blocks seem to reflect interaction patterns that are prevalent in a wide range of circumstances. Our brains are probably learning particular interaction patterns that we encounter repeatedly as we develop social skills in life, according to Dr. Wittmann. These patterns might be ingrained in our brains as building blocks that are put together and put back together to create our perception of any social situation.

Journal Reference:

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