| Popis: |
In the present study, we integrated two crucial issues in cognitive neuroscience: (i) The field of brain connectome research has been characterising the fine-grained fractionation within of each identified functional network. (ii) The field of social neuroscience has been exploring how a network of social-affective cortical zones implement the representational codes to idiosyncratically represent personal identities. Here we performed a series of multivoxel decoding to investigate the neural representations of self- vs. other-referential concept, a pivotal psychological construct that permeates every aspects of social life and has been argued as a core function of the specialised system for social cognition. Across multiple analyses, we found a robust dyadic fractionation between the two subnetworks within the social system - multivoxel patterns reliably dissociated between regions that are affiliated with the 'default mode' network and those with the 'semantic cognition' network, evident both in the outcomes of supervised classification and representational similarity. Moreover, representational configuration of the neural responses to self- and other-referential thoughts mirrored the psychological continuum of social distance, from an integral sense of one's present self to a distant other, with the broad-stroke distinction of 'self-ness vs. otherness' being the principal axis in the representational space, and social distance being the auxiliary axis. Taken together, our findings inform the burgeoning endeavour of connectome research about brain's network architecture and how it impacts on social cognition. |
