英国牛津大学Matthew F. S. Rushworth团队报道了背内侧额叶皮层复杂社会决策的基函数。2025年3月12日出版的《自然》发表了这项成果。

在他们以功能性磁共振成像、行为实验和社会群体决策任务为主题的研究中，小组发现dmPFC和ACC代表了特定情况下社会互动的组合可能性，并且它们以压缩格式进行，类似于以空间、视觉和运动领域为主题的基函数。基本功能与社会互动类型一致，而不是个人身份。他们的研究结果表明，在视觉和运动领域的抽象神经编码方案与他们的社会认同感的构建之间存在着深刻的相似性。

据了解，在社会环境中导航对大脑来说是一个根本性的挑战。已经确定的是，大脑解决这个问题的部分方式是以代理为中心的方式来表示社会信息；关于他人能力或态度的知识被标记为个体，如“自己”或“他人”。这种直观的方法使该课题组了解了大脑社交部分的关键节点，即背内侧前额叶皮层（dmPFC）和前扣带皮层（ACC）。然而，个体之间相互作用的模式或组合与个体的身份同样重要。

附：英文原文

Title: Basis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial frontal cortex

Author: Wittmann, Marco K., Lin, Yongling, Pan, Deng, Braun, Moritz N., Dickson, Cormac, Spiering, Lisa, Luo, Shuyi, Harbison, Caroline, Abdurahman, Ayat, Hamilton, Sorcha, Faber, Nadira S., Khalighinejad, Nima, Lockwood, Patricia L., Rushworth, Matthew F. S.

Issue&Volume: 2025-03-12

Abstract: Navigating social environments is a fundamental challenge for the brain. It has been established that the brain solves this problem, in part, by representing social information in an agent-centric manner; knowledge about others’ abilities or attitudes is tagged to individuals such as ‘oneself’ or the ‘other’1,2,3,4,5,6. This intuitive approach has informed the understanding of key nodes in the social parts of the brain, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)7,8,9. However, the patterns or combinations in which individuals might interact with one another is as important as the identities of the individuals. Here, in four studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging, behavioural experiments and a social group decision-making task, we show that the dmPFC and ACC represent the combinatorial possibilities for social interaction afforded by a given situation, and that they do so in a compressed format resembling the basis functions used in spatial, visual and motor domains10,11,12. The basis functions align with social interaction types, as opposed to individual identities. Our results indicate that there are deep analogies between abstract neural coding schemes in the visual and motor domain and the construction of our sense of social identity.

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08705-9

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08705-9