Neural mechanisms of stable and transient hierarchy on social decision making

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

Project Summary This application seeks to understand how temporally-dynamic information is incorporated into social decisions by investigating the influence of social hierarchy on basic neural and cognitive processes engaged in valuation and learning. While some kinds of social information are stable, others can fluctuate in a way that can shift a social context. Hierarchy, or the organization of individuals according to power and status, is a common feature of most social animal species including humans and is a kind of social information that can exhibit both stable and transient qualities. Knowing a person’s place in society may shape an individual’s decisions to trust or learn from them. Critically, deficits in social decisions, broadly, are observed in psychopathologies ranging from autism to schizophrenia and potentially, such deficits might arise from maladaptive monitoring and integration of time-varying social features such as hierarchy. While stable hierarchical identities like socioeconomic status or gender could influence a person’s decision to trust or learn from professionals like medical doctors or teachers, situational contexts can further transiently increase or decrease perceived differences in power or status (e.g., being at a hospital or in a classroom). The intersection between these stable and transient features of hierarchy are especially important because power dynamics may engage distinct or overlapping mental processes. For instance, patients might be more proactive in suggesting alternative therapies if they perceive healthcare providers to be of similar social status. These processes might further modulate different kinds of decisions depending on implicit goals. Affiliative and competitive goals might be under dissociable influence of hierarchy if the neural and cognitive processes involved in the decisions only partially overlap. While traditional psychological experiments have investigated human social decisions using anonymous or unknown partners (which offers important experimental control), this limitation is detached from real-world scenarios in which humans acquire dynamic information about the people with whom they are interacting. Studying the neural mechanisms involved in these decisions can provide information about the basic cognitive processes that contribute to maladaptive decision making. Specifically, computations in brain regions like the striatum, prefrontal cortex, and temporoparietal junction supporting reward maximization over costs, mentalizing, and learning abilities are important for interactions with others. Notably, the functional roles of these regions are consistently implicated in clinical disorders like schizophrenia and autism, which share common social behavior deficits. Therefore, understanding the brain mechanisms involved in the integration of social hierarchy with learning and decision making can provide transdiagnostic insight about social behavior. This examination of interactions between psychological constructs like reward valuation and learning with social processes achieves and extends the goals of the Research Domains Criteria (RDoC) Initiative by considering the temporal elements of social context at the neural and cognitive levels. Aim 1 of this proposal will investigate how stable and transient social information is integrated in decisions with affiliative goals. Here, participants will make decisions about sharing rewards in a distribution game. Specific hypotheses will be tested by combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and computational modelling to test whether neural representations can distinguish costly sharing of rewards between oneself and others when information is provided about others’ social status and power in both stable and transient domains. Aim 2 will extend these mechanisms to a competitive social learning context. During fMRI, participants will perform a task that permits evaluation of complex belief learning from decisions made by opponents. Hypotheses will evaluate whether brain mechanisms supporting social learning depend on competitors’ perceived status and power. Studying these processes in the same participants who complete the experiment in Aim 1 will further allow comparison of hierarchical identity representation. Specific test will evaluate whether humans form latent representations that change depending on the context across different dimensions: affiliative versus competitive goals, stable hierarchy position, and transient hierarchy position. Finally, Aim 3 will investigate how these neural representations relate to daily social interactions and personal experiences with social inequality. When interacting with others whose perceived hierarchy is either ambiguous or different than one’s own, humans tend to deploy emotion regulation strategies. Deficits in emotion regulation abilities, however, are symptomatic of a range of psychopathologies. Therefore, here we will identify whether neural representations of social hierarchy are related to daily life social-hierarchy related emotion regulation and abilities to mentalize the intentions of people who vary in social hierarchy. The correspondence of brain mechanisms to real-world decisions outside of the lab can inform potential future interventions that alleviate social decision-making deficits in psychopathology. Overall, this proposal has been designed to combine the candidate’s expertise in functional neuroimaging and economic decision making to prepare the candidate for an independent research career focused on neural mechanisms of social decision making.