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Poster B138 in Poster Session B - Thursday, August 8, 2024, 1:30 – 3:30 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Hippocampal Encoding of Abstract Cognitive Maps Supports Navigation in a Real-World Social Network
Yi Yang Teoh1, Jae-Young Son1, Alice Xia1, Isabella Aslarus1, Apoorva Bhandari1, Oriel FeldmanHall1; 1Brown University
Despite the complex relational structure of human social networks, people adeptly navigate their communities. Recent work suggests people accomplish this by building predictive cognitive maps of others’ social relations, but little is known about how the brain encodes these representations. Here, we interrogate two representational formats differing in their assumptions about how information flows through large human networks: sequential transmission vs simultaneous propagation. Evidence from a real-world social network reveals that people’s cognitive maps of social ties are built to track simultaneous propagation of information, and that the anterior hippocampus encodes these predictive representations to support social navigation.
Keywords: Social Networks Cognitive Maps Representation Learning Hippocampus