Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: The Neural Basis of Social Influence Perception

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) and Cognitive Neuroscience programs. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Drs. Shari Liu, Marina Bedny, and Tianmin Shu at Johns Hopkins University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating how social and physical cognition interact in the mind and brain. Specifically, this project seeks to understand the neural basis of social influence perception. We often use physical concepts to describe social influence: for instance, we may ‘push’ an athlete to perform better via words of encouragement, or ‘pressure’ a peer into doing something reckless by threatening them with exclusion. This project will investigate whether understanding physical force and understanding ‘social force’ rely on similar neural mechanisms. It is predicted that brain regions that are specialized for processing physical concepts, such as pushing and pulling, will also be involved in processing analogous forms of social influence, such as helping and hindering. Overall, the results of this project will enrich theories on the relationship between physical and social cognition and inform applications that take advantage of links between the two. This project will utilize behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI) methods to investigate how we encode information about features of physical and social events and ask whether physical concepts are used to understand social influence. The first aim is to characterize univariate, multivariate, and integrative neural responses in physics regions and Theory of Mind (ToM) regions to stimuli that prompt physical and social reasoning to varying degrees. The fellow will ask if these regions contain not just domain-specific information but also some information from the 'opposite' domain. The second aim is to examine neural responses to actions embedded in naturalistic contexts. The fellow will investigate how physics and ToM regions work together to understand socially-rich actions. The third aim is to directly probe the use of physical concepts to process real-world social events by comparing physical force interactions and social force interactions. One hypothesis is that brain regions recruited for physical force will also process and represent social force. Finally, the fellow will take advantage of common analyses across studies and compare results across different tasks. These cross-study comparisons may reveal functions of physics and ToM regions that are dependent on task, modality, and content. Overall, this work will advance our knowledge of how physical and social cognition interact at the cognitive and neural levels. Crucially, it examines the extent to which perception of social influence is grounded in physical cognition. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.