Social preferences correlate with cortical thickness of the orbito-frontal cortex

Abstract

Humans differ in their preferences for personal rewards, fairness, and others’ welfare. Such social preferences predict trust, public goods provision, and mutual gains bargaining, and have been linked to neural activity in regions involved in reward computation, cognitive control, and perspective taking. Although shaped by culture, social preferences are relatively stable across time, raising the question whether differences in brain anatomy predict social preferences and their key components—concern for personal outcomes and concern for others’ outcomes. Here we examine this possibility by linking social preferences measured with incentivized economic games to 74 cortical parcels in N = 194 healthy humans. Neither concerns for personal outcomes nor concerns for the outcomes of others in isolation were related to anatomical differences. However, fitting earlier findings, social preferences positively scaled with cortical thickness in the left olfactory sulcus, a structure in the orbital frontal cortex previously shown to be involved in value-based decision making. Consistent with work showing that heavier usage corresponds to larger brain volume, findings suggest that pro-social preferences relate to cortical thickness in the left olfactory sulcus because of heavier reliance on the orbital frontal cortex during social decision-making.

Hemispheric Cortical, Cerebellar and Caudate Atrophy Associated to Cognitive Impairment in Metropolitan Mexico City Young Adults Exposed to Fine Particulate Matter Air Pollution

“…Strikingly, the poorer cognitive performance in MMC residents was associated with caudate and left orbital gyrus atrophy in keeping with orbital frontal cortex connections with regions processing visual, spatial, emotional information and social cognition, PFCcaudate brain wiring, and caudate functions affecting learning, memory, reward and motivation [69][70][71][72][73][74]. The current findings are not unexpected, i.e., the cerebellar atrophy is significant and could have a clinical counterpart in gait and equilibrium abnormalities described by our group in young MMC urbanites [75], cognitive deficits [16,57], the association between hearing loss and decreased brainstem and cerebellar volumes in AD cases [76], and gait and cognitive abnormalities associated with regional cerebellar atrophy in elderly fallers [77].…”

Neurocomputational mechanisms of biased impression formation in lonely individuals

“…Evidence that the OFC reflects the overall value of choices, options and stimuli (31) suggests that in a social interaction, the OFC might reflect an individual's first impressions of their social partners. However, given its role in representations of one's and other's social traits and preferences (32,33), the OFC might as well track the learnt characteristics of a social partner. Hence, we set out to test whether the OFC in our task was more informative of participants' first impressions of the advisers or their judgments about the advisers' specific trustworthiness levels.…”

Neurocomputational mechanisms of biased impression formation in lonely individuals

“…Evidence that the OFC reflects the overall value of choices, options and stimuli 34 suggests that in a social interaction, the OFC might reflect an individual’s first impressions of their social partners. However, given its role in representations of one’s and other’s social traits and preferences 35 , 36 , the OFC might as well track the learnt characteristics of a social partner. Hence, we set out to test whether the OFC in our task was more informative of participants’ first impressions of the advisers or their judgments about the advisers’ specific trustworthiness levels.…”