Two-thirds of human socializing centers on exchanging information about people: their behaviors, thoughts, and traits. Yet, how we track the social information swarming our everyday lives remains largely unknown. Our research integrates social psychology and cognitive neuroscience to understand what drives our tendency, ability, and need to think about the social world around us.
We aim to answer questions such as: How do we make social predictions on the fly? How do we learn and remember information from our social lives? How do we represent the complex social networks we’re embedded in?
Are we Social by default?
The overwhelming majority of neuroscience research on social cognition measures neural activity during a task. This makes a lot of sense--it is good to know that the neural activation you observe is tied to a psychological state that, as an experimenter, you have induced. Yet, this paradigm has overshadowed a very interesting phenomenon that may reveal a great deal about social cognition. That is, the medial frontoparietal system that activates during social cognition tasks is also consistently active when we are not performing any experimental task at all. This phenomenon is so robust that it even led neuroscientists to name this network the 'default network' since it is consistently active by default, in the absence of other instructions. Why would the same neurocognitive system that activates during experimentally induced social cognition also robustly engage by default? In this line of research, we aim to characterize the social cognitive functions of engaging the medial frontoparietal network “by default”. So far, we have discovered that default network activity during rest before a social encounter nudges us to interpret people in our next encounter and re-engaging the default network after a social experience consolidates the new social information we just acquired.
RELEVANT PUBLICATIONS:
Collier, E., & Meyer, M. L. (2020). Memory of others’ disclosures is consolidated during rest and associated with providing support: neural and linguistic evidence. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Meyer, M. L., Davachi, L., Ochsner, K. N., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Evidence that default network connectivity during rest consolidates social information. Cerebral Cortex.
Meyer, M. L. & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Why people are always thinking about themselves: Medial prefrontal cortex activity at rest primes self-referential processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Spunt, R. P., Meyer, M. L., & Lieberman, M. D. (2015). The default mode of human brain function primes the intentional stance, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
How do we navigate challenging social situations?
Everyday social cognition involves a great deal of information juggling. Just as an example, consider a social gathering where multiple people, with different backgrounds and relationships with one another, all converse. To smoothly navigate this social event, you will need to keep track of who said what, as well as why he or she said it. As the complexity and number of people in the situation increases, so will your need to manage social information in mind. How do we pull off such complex social information processing on the fly? In this line of research, we examine the brain mechanisms that support the moment-to-moment maintenance and manipulation of social cognitive information, or 'social working memory.' Our findings so far suggest that social cognitive forms of working memory may preferentially recruit the medial frontoparietal network (or 'default network') that otherwise interferes with non-social forms of working memory.
RELEVANT PUBLICATIONS:
Meyer, M. L., & Collier, E. (2020). Theory of Minds: Managing mental state inferences in working memory is associated with the dorsomedial subsystem of the default network and social integration. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi: 10.1093/scan/nsaa022
Meyer, M. L., Taylor, S. E., & Lieberman, M.D. (2015). Social working memory and its distinctive link to social cognitive ability: An fMRI study. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Meyer, M. L., Spunt, R. P., Berkman, E. T., Taylor, S. E., & Lieberman, M. D. (2012). Evidence for social working memory from a parametric functional MRI study. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109, 1883-1888.
Meyer, M. L. & Lieberman, M. D. (2012). Social working memory: Neurocognitive networks and directions for future research. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 1-11.
HOW DO WE REPRESENT OURSELVES AND OTHERS?
Why can we feel lonely even when we’re surrounded by others? Why do we struggle to make decisions in the present that would benefit our future selves? We are finding that the default network organizes representations of ourselves and others based on how “connected” we feel to them. People who feel socially disconnected also show less neural pattern similarity between the self and others in the default network. In other words, they show a “lonelier” neural representation in the brain. Participants also show less default network neural pattern similarity between their present and future selves, which may help explain quirky decision-making like temporal discounting (i.e., choosing a smaller reward in the present over a larger reward in the future).
RELEVANT PUBLICATIONS:
Brietzke, S., & Meyer, M. L. (in press). Temporal self-compression: Behavioral and neural evidence that past and future selves are compressed as they move away from the present. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Courtney, A. L., & Meyer, M. L. (2020). Self-other representation in the social brain reflects social connection. Journal of Neuroscience, 4(20), 5616-5627.
WHY ARE SOCIAL EXPERIENCES “STICKY”?
Why does pain feel worse when it is caused intentionally as opposed to accidentally? Why is it more upsetting to think about a former betrayal than a past physical injury? Why do we preferentially experience nostalgia for our past social (relative to non-social) rewards? In this line of research, we examine why affective experiences generated by thinking about people--albeit intentions, social relationships, or self-concepts--are sustained and amplified relative to affect induced by non-social causes.
RELEVANT PUBLICATIONS:
Meyer, M. L., Williams, K. D., & Eisenberger, N. I. (2015). Why social pain can live on: Different neural mechanisms are associated with reliving social and physical pain. PLOS One, 10(6), e0128294.