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Poster C155 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Egocentric anchoring-and-adjustment of social knowledge in the hippocampus
Marta Rodriguez1 (), Mariachiara Esposito1, Raphael Kaplan1; 1Universitat Jaume I
Growing evidence suggests the hippocampus represents abstract relational knowledge, including social information, similar to how physical locations are represented on a map. Yet how map-like representations of abstract knowledge are influenced by personal biases is unclear. We test whether a prominent egocentric bias involving an implicit reliance on self-knowledge when rating others, anchoring-and-adjustment, affects how the relative attributes of different social entities are learned. Participants provided likelihood ratings of partaking in everyday activities for themselves, fictitious individuals, and familiar social groups. Subsequently during functional neuroimaging, participants learned a stranger’s preference for an activity relative to one of the fictitious individuals and decided how the stranger’s preference related to the groups’ preferences. Egocentric anchoring-andadjustment was present when participants rated the other entities, where anchoring interfered with performance when compared groups weren’t too different or similar to self ratings. Hippocampal signals similarly related to group-self rating discrepancy, suggesting that hippocampal sensitivity to egocentric anchoring influences dynamic world-centered inferences. Linking the hippocampus to individual subjective biases, increased similarity in hippocampal signal patterns over trials reflected participants’ propensity towards egocentrism. These findings imply that personal preferences help shape the hippocampus’ mnemonic representation of other people’s preferences.
Keywords: cognitive maps anchoring and adjustment social cognition hippocampus