How Dynamic Brain Networks Tune Social Behavior in Real Time

During social interaction, the brain has the enormous task of interpreting signals that are fleeting, subtle, contextual, abstract, and often ambiguous. Despite the signal complexity, the human brain has evolved to be highly successful in the social landscape. Here, we propose that the human brain makes sense of noisy dynamic signals through accumulation, integration, and prediction, resulting in a coherent representation of the social world. We propose that successful social interaction is critically dependent on a core set of highly connected hubs that dynamically accumulate and integrate complex social information and, in doing so, facilitate social tuning during moment-to-moment social discourse. Successful interactions, therefore, require adaptive flexibility generated by neural circuits composed of highly integrated hubs that coordinate context-appropriate responses. Adaptive properties of the neural substrate, including predictive and adaptive coding, and neural reuse, along with perceptual, inferential, and motivational inputs, provide the ingredients for pliable, hierarchical predictive models that guide our social interactions

Neural encoding of socially adjusted value during competitive and hazardous foraging

In group foraging organisms, optimizing the conflicting demands of competitive food loss and safety is critical. We demonstrate that humans select competition avoidant and risk diluting strategies during foraging depending on socially adjusted value. We formulate a mathematically grounded quantification of socially adjusted value in foraging environments and show using multivariate fMRI analyses that socially adjusted value is encoded by mid-cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortices, regions that integrate value and action signals

Seven Computations of the Social Brain

The social environment presents the human brain with the most complex of information processing demands. The computations that the brain must perform occur in parallel, combine social and nonsocial cues, produce verbal and non-verbal signals, and involve multiple cognitive systems; including memory, attention, emotion, learning. This occurs dynamically and at timescales ranging from milliseconds to years. Here, we propose that during social interactions, seven core operations interact to underwrite coherent social functioning; these operations accumulate evidence efficiently – from multiple modalities – when inferring what to do next. We deconstruct the social brain and outline the key components entailed for successful human social interaction. These include (1) social perception; (2) social inferences, such as mentalizing; (3) social learning; (4) social signaling through verbal and non-verbal cues; (5) social drives (e.g., how to increase one’s status); (6) determining the social identity of agents, including oneself; and (7) minimizing uncertainty within the current social context by integrating sensory signals and inferences. We argue that while it is important to examine these distinct aspects of social inference, to understand the true nature of the human social brain, we must also explain how the brain integrates information from the social world

Motivational Influences on Environmental and Information Exploration, Cognition, and Behavior

Humans stand alone as the sole extant species able to flexibly and effectively respond to virtually any environmental condition or threat, resulting in dominance over most environments on earth. While other animals may exceed human capabilities in some or many sensory modalities, human cognitive, affective and motivational systems integrate to promote unique capacities such as the ability to simulate possible experiences and imagine outcomes, and monitor changing environmental states in order to adapt dynamically in the service of goals. Our unreasonable effectiveness at navigating both our immediate and longer-term needs is facilitated by our motivational flexibility, which affords adaptive and context appropriate behaviors. Innate motivational drives, i.e. survival mechanisms (see Mobbs et al 2015), satiety, social bonding, along with evolutionarily endowed and culturally guided values, and orthogonal levers described by theories such as Regulatory Focus (promotion / prevention see (Higgins, E.T. 1997)), facilitate particular motivational states and shifts thereof (i.e. imperative or interrogative (see Murty & Adcock 2017) to guide ongoing behavior in order to satisfy our needs. These motivational factors interact with the various contexts we encounter to inform our exploration behaviors in our myriad physical and digital information environments. This thesis assesses the effects of motivation in its various manifestations on how we explore our myriad environments; how and when we sample specific kinds of information and what we prioritize; and the downstream effects on cognition, behavior and memory. Each study deploys a novel, custom platform and varying dynamic contexts designed to examine 1) decision-making under competition and threat in a virtual foraging task (Study 1); 2) navigational behavior under threat and subsequent spatial and item-based memory in virtual navigation task (Study 2); and 3) information foraging, and attitude change in the modern digital information environment (Study 3). Motivational factors are shown to affect exploratory behaviors in each of these domains. Threat often induces an imperative motivational state, influencing environmental selection in a two-patch foraging task, and access to or use of memory systems in the service of navigational goals. Finally, online contexts interact with motivational influences to determine how we search for, select, and consume competing information to form or update attitudes and make decisions

Dopey dopamine: high tonic results in ironic performance

Financial incentives are commonly used as motivational tools to enhance performance. Decades of research have established that the neurotransmitter dopamine (DA) is the fuel that propels reward-motivated behavior, yet a new PET study questions whether dopamine is beneficial to performance, showing that tonic DA synthesis predicts performance decrements when incentives are high

Dopey dopamine: high tonic results in ironic performance

Financial incentives are commonly used as motivational tools to enhance performance. Decades of research have established that the neurotransmitter dopamine (DA) is the fuel that propels reward-motivated behavior, yet a new PET study questions whether dopamine is beneficial to performance, showing that tonic DA synthesis predicts performance decrements when incentives are high

Detecting and Responding to Threats in the Natural World

Organisms that evolved nervous systems that predict, detect, and assess ecological dangers are at a distinct survival advantage compared to those with less sophisticated neural machinery. The strategies generated and honed by adaptive survival circuits in humans, which we call the survival optimization system (SOS), are controlled by both conscious and implicit systems

Detecting and Responding to Threats in the Natural World

Organisms that evolved nervous systems that predict, detect, and assess ecological dangers are at a distinct survival advantage compared to those with less sophisticated neural machinery. The strategies generated and honed by adaptive survival circuits in humans, which we call the survival optimization system (SOS), are controlled by both conscious and implicit systems

Close Encounters of the Digital Kind: Motivated Search, Selection and Decision-Making in an Interactive Digital Context

Interactive digital contexts have become ubiquitous and indispensable, capturing hours of attention and influencing everyday decision-making, content consumption, purchasing behaviors, and the formation and updating of attitudes in a variety of domains. These carefully designed environments interact with human motivation to influence behaviors and beliefs, including in impactful domains such as science and public policy. Digital information contexts such as the newly released AI ChatGPT and Google may or have become the de facto standard for information search and content delivery, however search results in these contexts arrive either devoid of editorial filtering or with limited procedural transparency, or both. The potential societal costs of “wild information” are immense, especially for areas such as scientific technology that can provide significant benefits with low and manageable risk (i.e. vaccines, or genetically modified foods (GM). Using GM foods as a focal topic, we designed and implemented a custom search engine and content delivery system to identify the stages at which human motivation operates and its effects on search and selection behavior, attitude updating and decision-making in the context of widely-used interactive digital technology. Results demonstrate Google format searching often reflects prior beliefs and background media sentiment about GM foods, while menu-style searching reflects only prior attitudes. Prior attitudes influence search and content selection and in turn, content selection influences both attitudes about GM foods and decision-making in a food selection task. These results demonstrate when and how motivation covertly operates during digital information search and selection, and how search-based interactive technology interacts with motivational and cognitive systems to influence belief and real-world decision-making

Threat impairs flexible use of a cognitive map

Goal-directed behavior requires adaptive systems that respond to environmental demands. In the absence of threat (or presence of reward), individuals are free to explore a large number of behavioral trajectories, effectively interrogating the environment across many dimensions. This leads to flexible, relational memory encoding and retrieval. In the presence of imminent danger, motivation shifts to an imperative state characterized by a narrow focus of attention on threatening information. This impairs flexible, relational memory. Here, we test how these proposed motivational shifts (Murty & Adcock, 2017) affect behavioral flexibility and memory in an ecologically valid setting. Participants learned the structure of a maze-like environment and navigated to the location of everyday objects in both safe and threatening contexts. The latter contained a predator that could ‘capture’ participants, leading to electric shock. After learning, the path to some objects was unpredictably blocked, forcing a detour for which one route was significantly shorter. We predicted that the threatening environment would push participants toward an imperative state, leading to less efficient and less flexible navigation. Across 3 studies, we found that threat caused participants to take longer paths to goal objects and less efficient detours when obstacles were encountered. A critical control analysis revealed that the threat-related impairment in detour navigation persisted even after controlling for non-detour navigation performance, and that non-detour navigation was not a reliable predictor of detour navigation. This suggests a specific impairment in flexible navigation during detours, an impairment that cannot be explained by more general processes like predator avoidance or divided attention, which may be present during non-detour navigation. These results provide ecologically valid evidence that imperative states, triggered by a dynamic, observable threat, reduce the ability to flexibly use cognitive maps to guide in-the-moment behavior