FriSem

Eshin Jolly, Postdoc, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College

Title: Navigating the Social World: A relational account of how we represent, remember, and talk about others

Abstract: How do we navigate the social world? Social neuroscience has primarily focused on person-specific features: attributes and trait impressions we form by observing others’ actions and inferring their intentions and mental states. On the other hand, a growing literature in learning and memory has demonstrated how encoding context in relational representations is critical for building useful cognitive maps to facilitate prediction in spatial but also abstract spaces. In this talk, I’ll discuss new work testing the idea that people can act as contexts just like space and time, and that relationships between individuals serve as the basis for social memory and person representation. Using a naturalistic approach, we scan participants while they watch 3 hours of a television character drama, and later probe their social memory in multiple ways as a means to understand how they spontaneously learn and represent others. Using a variety of analysis approaches, we consistently find that relationships between people organize naturalistic social memories in the absence of an explicit task, raising the possibility that the same cognitive and neural machinery utilized for abstract relational encoding and representation in non-social domains, may be repurposed for encoding and representing social information. Time permitting, I’ll discuss previous work exploring how and why we share social information, or gossip, as a way to learn from and connect with others.