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Poster C158 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Cortical regions preferentially engaged during social and physical processing represent obstacles to agent action and object motion
Minjae Kim1 (), Sam Maione1, Assiya Drissi1, Shari Liu1; 1Johns Hopkins University
In cognitive neuroscience, we routinely study the neural substrates of social cognition and physical cognition by directly contrasting neural responses in social and physical tasks. Yet, this approach can occlude computations that are shared across domains. Using an open fMRI dataset, we test the hypothesis that two cortical regions previously shown to be preferentially engaged for social and physical perception -- the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) -- nonetheless contain representations relevant for both domains. Participants were scanned as they watched and made predictions about two dots interacting like social agents or inanimate objects. In exploratory functional region-of-interest analyses, we found that multivariate patterns in STS and SMG contained information about whether the scene included a physical barrier, despite showing strong and opposite preferences for social and physical videos. These findings suggest that cortical regions specialized for social and physical functions may share representational content.
Keywords: cognitive neuroscience domain-specificity physical reasoning social cognition