A huge thanks to the lab, the wonderful faculty at the Consortium for Interacting Minds and Columbia Psychology, and many incredible graduate school friends for your unending support and the privilege of doing science with each of you.
Perhaps, the brain is designed to prioritize social consolidation - over other kinds of consolidation - by default during rest. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Sociality is a defining feature of the human experience: We rely on others to ensure survival and cooperate in complex social networks to thrive. A...
In conclusion, we show that the DMPFC, a key node of the default network (which is robustly engaged at rest), prioritizes the consolidation of social information at rest.
Given that social reinstatement in the DMPFC is meaningfully related to social memory performance - and there is evidence of greater reinstatement at earlier times of rest - is social consolidation specific to early rest?
We saw a greater amount of social reinstatement in the DMPFC at earlier, compared to middle and later, time periods of rest. Interestingly, not seen for nonsocial reinstatement in the DMPFC. Also not seen for social or nonsocial reinstatement in lVLPFC.
But what makes one of these consolidation mechanisms prioritized over another? We argue that temporal precedence allows for a prioritization claim. If we only have a few minutes in between meetings, which kind of information gets consolidated earlier?
When we looked in the lVLPFC, we found the opposite. Participants nonsocial pattern reinstatement significantly correlated with participants nonsocial memory performance.
We implemented a multivariate pattern reinstatement analysis. We found that - in the DMPFC - participants social pattern reinstatement significantly correlated with social memory performance.
After, they were presented with a surprise memory test. We found that, even while controlling for constructs often known to enhance memorability (e.g. familiarity, pleasantness, interestingness, excitability), participants still showed superior memory for the social video clips.
