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SOCIAL DECISION-MAKING

Navigating social knowledge

Nature Neuroscience volume 24, pages 1195–1197 (2021)Cite this article

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Everyday phrases like ‘top dog’ and ‘low status’ suggest that we may mentally represent social and spatial information similarly. To what extent is that true? New research suggests that, like physical space, social knowledge is encoded as a cognitive map in the human brain and represented with a grid-like code.

Imagine that you are starting a company. Among the potential partners you know, who has the competence to help you succeed in business management? Who could help you gain public awareness and popularize your brand? How can you create a team with complementary skills? In everyday life, you likely engage in countless acts of reasoning about individuals’ various traits and comparing them to each other. How does the brain support our ability to do this? New work by Park et al.1 suggests that the human brain represents and infers abstract relations between people using a grid-like code, similarly to the way it represents relations between locations in physical space.

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Fig. 1: Investigating the encoding and navigation of social knowledge.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Meng Du & Carolyn Parkinson

  2. Brain Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Carolyn Parkinson

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  1. Meng Du
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  2. Carolyn Parkinson
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Correspondence to Meng Du or Carolyn Parkinson.

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Du, M., Parkinson, C. Navigating social knowledge. Nat Neurosci 24, 1195–1197 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-021-00900-x

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