Neural Mechanisms of Social Cognition and Decision-Making

Large-Scale Functional Connectivity Patterns Underlying Common Sense Perception (Behavior & fMRI study)

• Investigated the neural mechanism underlying the process of judging whether a certain behavior or knowledge is common sense or not

• Incorporated two different decision contexts involving different cultural perspectives for making common sense judgments to account for the social variability of the judgments

• Demonstrated that common sense judgment requires integrated neural involvements of a general memory retrieval network and social-affective regions, which include the amygdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, medial temporal lobe, angular gyrus, and hippocampus

 

 

**Published**

Ahn, J*., Kim H*., Park, J., & Han, S. (in press) Interactivity of neural representations for perceiving shared social memory, Korean Journal of the Science of Emotion and Sensibility, 21(3)

 

 

Abstract

 

Even though the concept of “common sense” is often taken for granted, judging whether a behavior or knowledge is common sense actually requires a complex series of mental processes. Additionally, having different perceptions of common sense causes social conflicts. Thus, it is important to understand how we perceive common sense and make relevant judgments. The present study investigated the dynamics of neural representations underlying the process of judging what common sense is. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants indicated the extent to which they thought a given sentence corresponded to common sense under the given perspective. Here, we incorporated two different decision contexts involving different cultural perspectives for making common sense judgments to account for the social variability of the judgments, an important feature of common sense judgment apart from logical true/false judgment. Our findings demonstrated that common versus non common-sense perception requires the neural involvement of the amygdala and a brain network for episodic memory recollection, which includes the hippocampus, angular gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, suggesting an integrated affective, mnemonic, and social functioning in common sense processing. Furthermore, functional connectivity multivariate pattern analysis revealed that the interactivity among the amygdala, angular gyrus, and parahippocampal cortex reflected representational features of common sense perception and not those of non  common-sense perception. Our study demonstrated that the social memory network is exclusively involved in processing common sense and not non common-sense. The results suggest that intergroup exclusion and misunderstanding can be reduced by experiencing and encoding long-term social memories about behavioral norms and knowledge that act as common sense of outgroup. 

 

 

 

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