Shafaqna English- A new study have found that our brains use basic ‘building blocks’ of information to keep track of how people interact, enabling us to navigate complex social interactions.
For the study, the researchers scanned the brains of participants who were playing a simple game involving a teammate and two opponents, to see how their brains were able to keep track of information about the group of players.
The scientists found that rather than keeping track of the performance of each individual player, specific parts of the participants’ brains would react to specific patterns of interaction, or ‘building blocks’ of information that could be combined to understand what was going on.
In this research, they found that our brains appear to use a set of basic ‘building blocks’ that represent fundamental aspects of social interactions, enabling us to quickly figure out new and complex social situations.”
For the study, the team of scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record the brain activity of 88 participants who were playing a simple game. While in the scanner, the study participants were given a series of information about how they, a partner, and their opponents were faring in a game, and needed to keep track of the information in order to answer a question comparing performances of different players.
The scientists were able to pinpoint specific patterns of activity in the brain that represented a few specific ‘building blocks’, each representing a pattern of interaction between the players.
Source: University College London