FROM LEARNING AND MEMORY PROCESSES TO THE TOPOLOGY OF ONE'S LARGER SOCIAL NETWORK

Abstract

This Cortica journal club attempts to answer two complicated yet very interesting questions in cognitive neuroscience. The first is how we learn and memories and the second is how our learning and memories affect and/or are affected by our community ties? On one hand, learning which is the initial process of encoding starts already in the womb and continues throughout life. Encoding is the first process of the memory faculty and occurs in the medial temporal lobe regions. Therefore, damage to these regions can have negative outcomes such as amnesia. Additionally, various factors including stress, motivation, negative events, and age have an influence on learning and encoding and therefore, also how and if memories are stored and remembered. On the other hand, collective cognition, beliefs, memories, behavior, and neural similarities can be seen as reasons as to why we are like our friends, family members and community. This is since social network topology shapes collective cognition despite the diverse structures. Furthermore, it has also been revealed that a shorter geodesic distance and the influence of a powerful ingroup member plays a key role similar neural pattern.