Salience-based information integration: An overarching function of the “social brain”?

Abstract

Behavior in social contexts is routinely accompanied by neural activity in a brain network comprising the bilateral temporoparietal junction (TPJ), dorsomedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dmPFC and dlPFC), and precuneus. This network - often referred to as the "social brain network" (SBN) - is thought to have evolved in response to the information processing demands of life in social groups. However, its precise functional contributions to behavior are unclear, since many of its areas are also activated in non-social contexts requiring, for example, attentional orienting or context updating. Here we argue that these results may reflect a basic neural mechanism implemented by areas in this network that is commonly required in both social and non-social contexts: Integrating multiple sensory and memory inputs into salient configurations, such as social constellations or perceptual Gestalts. We tested this hypothesis using a numeracy paradigm that orthogonally varied the salience of sensory target configurations and the required motor responses. Even in this non-social task, several regions of the SBN (TPJ, dmPFC, and precuneus) showed higher activity when the goal required the brain to attend to more versus less salient perceptual configurations. This activation pattern was specific to configuration salience and did not reflect general task demand or switching to new contexts. Taken together, these results suggest that the integration of information into salient configurations may be a key function of SBN regions, thus offering a new perspective on the widespread recruitment of these areas across social and non-social contexts.

A Computational Account of the Normative Concerns Guiding Context-dependent Prosocial Behavior

“…Brain stimulation studies have confirmed that this region is key for norm compliance but not for judgments, as decreasing activity in this region affects the subjects' actions but not their perception of fairness (40,54,74). By contrast, judging norm-violations appears to recruit other regions, such as the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) (75,76) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) (77), which are often thought to be involved in the representation of other's thoughts and integration of salient social information (78). Extending our framework to brain imaging experiments would allow us to test directly whether different (or only partially overlapping) sets of brain regions are recruited for actions versus judgments in the same situations, and to capture individual differences in these two sets of neural processes.…”

A neurocomputational account of the link between social perception and social action

“…Determining whether socially relevant cues are processed by domain-specific or domain-general neural circuitry remains an active goal of the social and cognitive neurosciences. While considerable evidence exists for specificity in some domains (e.g., face processing 120-122 122 , emotion recognition [127][128][129] , empathy in different modalities 89 , or even aspects of moral decisionmaking 133 ), other research points to the broad engagement of the mentalizing network across tasks [134][135][136][137][138][139][140] . Given their importance for decision-making, we sought to determine whether perceptions of either need or merit fall within the category of social phenomena processed by dedicated neural circuits.…”

Intertemporal prosocial behavior: a review and research agenda

“…This points to a novel mechanism that is quite different from classic temptation/selfcontrol models of intertemporal choice. Current thinking is that the regions involved in prosocial or temporal decision-making (e.g., the temporoparietal junction or the partially overlapping angular gyrus) provide higher-order cognitive functions that facilitate integration of multisensory input, and that this functionality is particularly useful when building mental representations of complex phenomena, like social context or temporal projection (Jung et al, 2022;Humphreys and Tibon, 2023;Lugrin et al, 2023). Consistent with this conceptualization, Pietrzak et al (2023) found that neural activity in angular gyrus and surrounding areas correlated with decisions in a standard temporal discounting task.…”