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SOCIAL DECISION-MAKING

Navigating social knowledge

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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.

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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

Authors
  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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The authors declare no competing interests.

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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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