Our brains use basic 'building blocks' of information to keep track of how people interact, enabling us to navigate complex social interactions, finds a new study led by University College London (UCL) researchers. For the study, published in Nature , 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.
Humans are social creatures that are capable of keeping track of highly complex and fluid social dynamics, requiring a massive amount of brain power to remember not only individual people but also the various relationships between them. In order to keep up with a group social interaction in real time, our brains must be using heuristics – mental shortcuts that help people make decisions quickly – to compress and simplify the wealth of information involved, with a system that minimises complexity while still allowing flexibility and detail. In this research, we 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 soci.