The neural signatures of social hierarchy-related learning and interaction: A coordinate- and connectivity-based meta-analysis
Siying Li,
Frank Krueger,
Julia A. Camilleri,
Simon B. Eickhoff,
Chen Qu
Affiliations
Siying Li
Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences, Ministry of Education, School of Psychology, Center for Studies of Psychological Application, and Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631 China
Frank Krueger
School of Systems Biology, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, United States; Department of Psychology, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, United States
Julia A. Camilleri
Research Center Jülich, Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-7), Germany; Medical Faculty, Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany
Simon B. Eickhoff
Research Center Jülich, Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-7), Germany; Medical Faculty, Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany
Chen Qu
Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences, Ministry of Education, School of Psychology, Center for Studies of Psychological Application, and Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631 China; Corresponding author.
Numerous neuroimaging studies have investigated the neural mechanisms of two mutually independent yet closely related cognitive processes aiding humans to navigate complex societies: social hierarchy-related learning (SH-RL) and social hierarchy-related interaction (SH-RI). To integrate these heterogeneous results into a more fine-grained and reliable characterization of the neural basis of social hierarchy, we combined coordinate-based meta-analyses with connectivity and functional decoding analyses to understand the underlying neuropsychological mechanism of SH-RL and SH-RI. We identified the anterior insula and temporoparietal junction (dominance detection), medial prefrontal cortex (information updating and computation), and intraparietal sulcus region, amygdala, and hippocampus (social hierarchy representation) as consistent activated brain regions for SH-RL, but the striatum, amygdala, and hippocampus associated with reward processing for SH-RI. Our results provide an overview of the neural architecture of the neuropsychological processes underlying how we understand, and interact within, social hierarchy.
