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Poster B129 in Poster Session B - Thursday, August 8, 2024, 1:30 – 3:30 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Separate Neural Representations for Physical and Communicative Social Interactions: Evidence from Data-driven Voxel Decomposition
Yuanfang Zhao1, Emalie McMahon1, Leyla Isik1; 1John Hopkins University
Recognizing social interactions is remarkable for its adaptive significance. Previous studies have suggested that the lateral visual cortex and superior temporal sulcus (STS) are generally involved in social interaction perception. However, it has been difficult to further disentangle neural responses of different types of social interaction with hypothesis-driven approaches, due to challenges with feature labeling, sampling and experimenter bias. Employing a data-driven voxel decomposition technique (i.e., non-negative matrix factorization, NMF) to a large-scale naturalistic fMRI dataset, our analysis of the lateral visual cortex and STS revealed two components with distinct functional profiles related to social interaction. The first component responds strongly to joint physical actions between people in the videos and weighs strongly in mid-level regions of the lateral stream, including middle temporal area (MT) and extrastriata body area (EBA). Conversely, the second component responds strongly to communicative interaction between people in the videos and weighs heavily in the anterior STS. Together, our findings suggest that joint action and communication represent two distinct forms of social interaction that are encoded differently in posterior to anterior regions along the lateral visual pathway.
Keywords: social interaction non-negative matrix factoraization joint action communication