Dynamic neural architecture for social knowledge retrieval

Abstract

Social behavior is often shaped by the rich storehouse of biographical information that we hold for other people. In our daily life, we rapidly and flexibly retrieve a host of biographical details about individuals in our social network, which often guide our decisions as we navigate complex social interactions. Even abstract traits associated with an individual, such as their political affiliation, can cue a rich cascade of person-specific knowledge. Here, we asked whether the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) serves as a hub for a distributed neural circuit that represents person knowledge. Fifty participants across two studies learned biographical information about fictitious people in a 2-d training paradigm. On day 3, they retrieved this biographical information while undergoing an fMRI scan. A series of multivariate and connectivity analyses suggest that the ATL stores abstract person identity representations. Moreover, this region coordinates interactions with a distributed network to support the flexible retrieval of person attributes. Together, our results suggest that the ATL is a central hub for representing and retrieving person knowledge.