Two Maps In the Mind: How the Brain Stores What We Know About Others

How does your brain keep track of the people in your life—not just who they are, but where they are in relation to you and to each other? 

In this episode of Under the Cortex, Özge Gürcanlı Fischer-Baum talks with Robert Chavez from the University of Oregon about his new findings published in Psychological Science, the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science. His research shows that our brains rely on two separate systems to encode person-knowledge: one that maps others in the broader world (allocentric), and another that maps them in relation to ourselves (egocentric). 

Together, these systems help us organize social memory and navigate our relationships with others. Tune in to learn how the brain structures our social world—and why it matters. 

Send us your thoughts and questions at [email protected]. 

Unedited Transcript

[00:00:09.220] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

This is Under the Cortex. Today, we explore how the brain represents the people we know. We will ask, how do we keep track of people’s traits and behaviors over time? I am Özge Gürcanli Fisher Baum with the Association for Psychological Science. I am joined by Robert Chavez from the University of Oregon, who has a recent article on this topic published in APS’s journal, Psychological Science. Together, we will ask, why does the brain use two different reference systems to encode social knowledge? Robert, welcome to Under the Cortex.

[00:00:41.420] – Robert Chavez

Hello.

[00:00:42.720] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? What psychologist are you and what motivates your work in social neuroscience?

[00:00:51.480] – Robert Chavez

I love this question in part because I always feel like everybody has a little bit of a different answer to it. I would identify as a social neuroscience scientist. When most people say that, they say, what social neuroscience is, is it’s using the tools of neuroscience to answer questions in social psychology. And of course, that’s part of it. But I actually think that’s a a limited view of what social neuroscience is in that it’s not just that the brain is a tool for understanding social behavior. It’s that neuroscience is a field unto itself. And I see the inferential direction between these two fields as really being informative. So it’s not just using the tools of neuroscience to understand social behavior. It’s also using the tools and theories and other methodological approaches of social psychology and other fields of psychology to understand cortical function and other parts of brain function and structure. To answer the question of what psychologist I am, I really see myself as an interdisciplinary one most of the time, and sometimes not even a psychologist at all. I guess it just depends on what day you catch me with what hat on.

[00:02:03.040] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, that’s a great answer. What I hear is that this is a bi-directional relationship between the two disciplines. Let’s talk about the article. We all keep mental lists of who is like whom, but how do our brains actually keep track of people we know?

[00:02:21.320] – Robert Chavez

Yeah, it’s a good question. In one sense, our brains keep track of people we know just like they keep track of everything we know. When I see a horse and a zebra, I know that those things are different. I know they have some things in common, but our brains store that information separately. But we have to conjure up this set of memories and understanding and knowledge and whatever to make sure that they’re still separate concepts for us, but are stored in there. And so when we’re talking about what makes other people special in our brains or whatever, it’s all built on the same cognitive architecture that we have for everything else. But there is a slightly different flavor to it, in part because we’re human, and humans are fundamentally social, and we really care about our social environments. So there does seem to be a little bit of extra stuff on top of that. But it’s all built from the same material is the way I think about it. So when we think of how do we keep lists of people we know and who’s like who, it’s just like everything else. We’re not actually literally keeping a list any more than we’re keeping a list of anything in our brains.

[00:03:30.840] – Robert Chavez

We’re activating these concepts in complicated ways. Of course, humans are very complicated, but it comes so natural to us that we just do these things spontaneously.

[00:03:42.220] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

You are talking about both domain-specific and domain-general processes being at place, right? It is really interesting. Your study focuses on something called person knowledge. How would you describe that to someone outside psychology?

[00:03:59.540] – Robert Chavez

Yeah, it’s a good question. So there’s different ways to break these things down, right? So in the field of social psychology and person perception, there’s a couple of different ways people think about it. So person perception is sometimes described as just what happens when you first perceive a person. You see their facial features, you see the way that they walk or these other things, right? The first bit of almost sensory or lower level information that you’re taking in about people. Social knowledge knowledge is what gets done with that information, to construct memories or to construct associations with particular people and what you know about those particular people. So when we’re talking about social knowledge, a common way that we think about it is just that it’s the information that’s associated with a particular person, such as their traits, but also their mental states and other things that we know are embedded within them from everything we’ve gotten to know about them. And the more we get to know people, the richer that representation is.

[00:05:04.320] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Let’s talk about the details of that representation a little bit. In the article, you talk about two different reference frames, allocentric and ecocentric. This is a domain general mechanism we are talking about, right? Can you explain those with real-life examples?

[00:05:22.240] – Robert Chavez

Yeah. The article is talking about egocentric and allocentric distances as they apply to social knowledge. So the point of the article was to adapt these notions of allocentric and egocentric distances to the study of social cognition. So then the question is, what are allocentric and egocentric distances? So the example I like to give, especially when I’m talking about this to students, is imagine you’re a basketball player, right? So you have the ball and you want to pass it to one of your fellow teammates, right? So you need to know, in part, where other players are on the court, right? So you need to know who who’s close to who, where the other defenders are from other people. So you need to know the distances among the other players. But you also need to know how far you are from each one of those players, too. And those are distinct from one another, right? So if Two players are 10 feet apart from one another, but I’m in the middle between them. They have a 10 foot allocentric distance, but a five foot egocentric distance between me and each of them, right? So they’re mathematically distinct.

[00:06:28.940] – Robert Chavez

And you can use that same information just based on any thing you measure. So it could be distances, or it could be social traits, or it could be anything to calculate other to other distances, allocentric distance, or self to other distances, egocentric distance. We borrowed this notion from spatial cognition and just imported it into our studies of person perception.

[00:06:52.100] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, let’s talk about that a little bit. What inspired you to apply special cognition models to social networks?

[00:07:00.000] – Robert Chavez

Yeah. So it really came from our motivation to pull in these interdisciplinary theories and ideas into different domains, right? So one of the nice things about work that’s been done in cognitive science and cognitive psychology over the years is that they have these nice frameworks for understanding how we perceive literal distances in the environment. And there’s some notion that what our brains are doing is not just remaking these things for a new construct all the time. Same brain regions that process spatial distances also process temporal distances. So close in time versus far in time, close in space versus far in space. And we weren’t the first to do this, but other researchers have done this in social domains, too, where they’re looking to say, Hey, somebody who’s close to me versus far from me in terms of our relationship, how do we process that as well? Here we did this in a more network way, where we’re thinking about not just one person, but lots different people, and particularly people that we know well. So these aren’t just like characters are watching on a TV show or something like that. These are real people that we know in real life, that, of course, that we have this nice, rich person knowledge representation of.

[00:08:16.040] – Robert Chavez

So we’re really inspired to take this framework that’s been really useful in cognitive science and apply it to these social domains.

[00:08:24.980] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

And I want to ask a little bit more about that decision. What I hear is that you made a conscious decision to use real or social groups, people we know, not just random strangers. What would the difference be and why was that important?

[00:08:42.960] – Robert Chavez

It was important to us to use the world’s social groups, in part because previous work that had done, not exactly this approach, but other work in social neuroscience, they’ll use things like fictional characters or maybe famous celebrities or things like that. And these are people that We do have person knowledge about and mental representations of, but we don’t really know them. We don’t come with all this memories or other things, experiences we’ve had with them. We haven’t sampled how we’ve experienced them in a bunch of different situations. And at least among real-world groups of people, you really get to know them well. We know how they act in different situations. We know how they might think in other situations or how they’d feel about that. And we know how different they are from one another. Sometimes in a very literal sense, we’ve seen them get along, we’ve seen them argue. In that way, we think it matches how people are actually processing information about the relationships among people or the way that we think of that similarities among people in a way that’s much more true to the real world than ones that we would get if we didn’t recruit real groups of friends that have these rich experiences with one another to bank Yeah, I love it.

[00:10:01.520] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

It sounds like a field trip. I would love to be a part of a study like that. How did participants rate each other? Let’s talk about the measures a little bit. In the study, you mentioned warmth and competence scores. What are they? How were they used in your analysis?

[00:10:22.080] – Robert Chavez

Yeah, so this goes back to what’s called the Stereotype Content Model, which was first proposed by Susan Fisk and others and colleagues. It was originally described, was developed to describe groups of people. So some groups of people are stereotyped in particular ways. So one of the classic examples is elderly people are high in warmth. We tend to think they’re very nice, but maybe lower incompetence, and other groups of people are stereotyped in these ways. Over the years, Fisk and colleagues and a bunch of other people have shown that, yes, this can be used to describe groups, but we can also think about people in these ways, and it does a pretty good job of capturing how just we’re perceiving people in a very vague general way, right? So when we’re asking about it, we’re just asking each person for every person in their group questions about their warmth and confidence. How friendly is this person? How sincere is this person? How tolerant is this person? And those are all domains of warmth, right? Or questions about warmth. Then we also ask them things like how independent they are? How smart are they? How skillful are they?

[00:11:35.760] – Robert Chavez

And these are more of their domains of competence. So when we put these all together, the way that we did it in this study was rather than averaging them or doing that, we just allowed all those questions to come together and calculate a distance score. It’s called a Euclidean distance among all the items in that to get a sense of how close they were in trait space, if you will, how So people who you would rate exactly the same would have a zero distance across all these measures. But nobody is rated exactly the same. So you can start to calculate all these differences among people. And because you’re answering these things for yourself as well, you can answer. So if I think I’m really competent, but not particularly warm or whatever combination that is, I can also calculate my difference between me and everybody else there. And that became the basis for the self to other distances, differences, the egocentric distance, and the other to other differences, the allocentric distance that we use in the analysis.

[00:12:39.960] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

This is fantastic. You created a spatial representation of social relationships. Then in the scanner, people were asked to make trade judgments. What were you looking for in their brain responses?

[00:12:53.760] – Robert Chavez

This is a common task that’s used in the scanner. People come in and they get shown a word saying who you’re talking about. It might say Rob, or it might say Sam, or whatever the name is. Then it has a trade adjective under it, and your job is just to respond, Does this word describe Sam, or Rob, or whoever? So you answer questions about the self, you answer questions about all the other people in your group. And really, the trait judgment task, it’s a little counterintuitive, but we actually aren’t using the traits in that during the analysis. Analysis. What we’re really using it for is just to get people to generate a mental model or activate a mental model of other people in the scanner. So the traits that they actually get asked about in the scanner just get averaged over to hopefully estimate some response to a particular individual that we use for the analysis. And why we think this works is because it’s extremely robust. So in other work that we’ve done, we’ve shown that just thinking about, just being asked about another person, you can decode who that person is thinking of just based on that information.

[00:14:09.700] – Robert Chavez

And it’s irrespective of whether or not somebody is endorsing the trait or not. If I say Is Sam really outgoing? And I say, no, it’s not about whether or not he’s outgoing that I’m getting. What it’s doing is it’s bringing up this representation of Sam. And what we’re picking up on, we think, is that bringing up Sam process. So the trait-adjective task is a little bit just a way of eliciting person knowledge. But we don’t, usually, or we often don’t in the analysis we do, look at the traits themselves. It’s a little bit different than you might think about it, but it’s just a way of eliciting person knowledge.

[00:14:50.960] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

You are just triggering a personal knowledge representation in the brain, so you can look at it. The analysis you used is a great fit for your research questions, you use multivoxel pattern analysis. Can you explain what that allows us to detect in the brain in plain terms?

[00:15:12.600] – Robert Chavez

Multivoxel pattern analysis is a different approach to fMRI and other neuroimaging analysis. So in a standard fMRI task or a standard way of doing cognitive neuroscience, what people were looking for activation differences between conditions. So the way I like to think about it or the example I give to students is if you imagine a brain region as a waffle. We’re measuring little brain responses in these three-dimensional pixels. So if you think of those as the little holes in the Waffle, sometimes we’re asking questions about which cognitive process has more syrup on the Waffle. So we’re looking to see where there’s more syrup for this condition versus that condition. Whereas MBPA doesn’t ask where there’s greater activation necessarily for one condition versus another. It says, Hey, how are the activation patterns, even if they’re the same between two cognitive processes, different? So you could have an equal amount of syrup on two different waffles, but if all the syrup is just on half of one side of one Waffle, but in a checkerboard pattern of the other, even if there’s not a mean difference in syrup, you can detect differences in those waffles.

[00:16:30.400] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Great example. Yes, I get it.

[00:16:33.080] – Robert Chavez

If you think about back to the brain, right? Our brains are, yes, they’re coming on and off more or less for different tasks. But what does that look like? What is the texture patterns picking up on. And what we’ve learned over the last 20 years or so is that there’s information embedded in those patterns that are specific to certain kinds of cognitive processes. So even when you don’t see mean differences between conditions, sometimes Sometimes you can reliably detect pattern differences when you look at it in a more multivariate way. This has been around for a while, these methods, but I think these are going to become the dominant approaches in social neuroscience for many years to come.

[00:17:16.700] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

I remember first hearing about this analysis when I was in grad school, but I’m not going to tell how many years ago it was. But that is definitely the right fit for your research questions. I love that Waffle analogy. I’m going to use it. In the end, you found that allocentric and egocentric personal knowledge are processed in different brain systems. Why should we care about this? Why is it important?

[00:17:46.380] – Robert Chavez

I think there’s this idea in social psychology, if I’m just thinking about how we understand the similarity among people, to not really think about the mechanisms. It’s just like, Okay, I know that these people are different from one another. It’s There’s probably some social cognitive system that computes that or whatever. I know I’m different from other people, and that sounds like it’s the same thing. I’m just another person in that system. So maybe it’s all just being driven by one single social cognitive system, if you will. The issue with doing this just behaviorally is it’s really hard to tease those things apart or to answer questions about, are there different systems, so to speak, that are calculating these behaviors or that are computing this information? And one of the nice things about brain imaging is that you get to ask questions that can have yes and response to them. So do our brains calculate or have some way of processing other to other differences? Yes. And those seem to be picking up on other systems that are responsible for processing spatial distances in general, right? So spatial distances, temporal distances, social distances, that’s all there.

[00:19:01.360] – Robert Chavez

But what we also found was that when it came to self and other distances, the egocentric similarities, a different brain system was involved there, too. And that’s important because that means that it’s not, does our brains process self to other differences, or do our brains process other to other differences? It means that they do both, and they do both in parallel. And that’s part of our understanding of how these systems work, right? So to take this out of a social psychology domain and why this might be important, if you get brain damage, let’s say, to one of these systems instead of another, right? You might expect certain kinds of symptoms from that, if you got brain damage in a different system, right? So if you’re seeing somebody who’s having neurological issues with confusing self and other dissimilarities, if you will, then you have a sense of where in the brain they might be having a tumor or some other issue. But if it was all just part of the same social cognitive system, those things wouldn’t port over. So in terms of how we understand these things or how we connect these different branches of psychology and neuroscience or whatever, that’s why I think having that communication between these fields is so important, Because we can answer these questions that have social psychological relevance.

[00:20:19.160] – Robert Chavez

Is it one social cognitive system? But may also have some real-world relevance, too. Like, Hey, if there’s multiple systems at play, can we use that to help people who may be having problems, too? That’s, of course, big picture and down the road, but it’s part of why I think it’s important.

[00:20:36.480] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

It is very clear the way you explain it. We have two distinct representations, and they work in parallel, but we have distinct representations for ourselves and others. Do you think these different representations shape how we interact in groups or form friendships?

[00:20:57.500] – Robert Chavez

Perhaps. It’s hard to say. In our study, we don’t get into this too much because everybody’s already friends or acquaintances when they come in. We know from some of our other work that when people in these groups are friends with one another, the more similar their brains think about a third person in their group, the closer their relationship is with one another. So the example I give for this is if you think of two characters from the American office, there’s Jim, the protagonist, and Pam. Part of the reason why they might be close with one another is because they’re thinking of a third person in the office, let’s say, Dwight, in a similar way. Now, we don’t know what the causal role is. Do they come to think of Dwight in the same way over time, or is that the reason why they were friends in the first place? It’s probably both. These things aren’t unrelated to how we’re making friends or doing other things, but there’s still a lot to learn, and we can’t unpack that in this current study, unfortunately.

[00:21:56.120] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Right. But this is quite interesting. Thanks for explaining I like it really well, because this is the one thing I didn’t get when I read the article. This is almost like we have shared representations with other people.

[00:22:08.820] – Robert Chavez

Yeah. In this current study, we didn’t look at that directly, but in other work that we’ve done, it’s along that line, yes. What we should do at some point is pass this together into another article where we can make it all connect the dots a bit. But I see them as all being related to one another. And for those analysis, it really is how we’re sharing brain-to-brain representations of certain individuals. This particular analysis was bringing the self back in. Okay, how do I think about myself differently than I think about other people, too? And again, that’s all part of how we’re processing information about the brain. Just like a car driving down the road, if you want to be safe on the road, you need to know where the other cars are, and you need to know where you are in relation to those other cars, too. And I see that as just being another analogy for these self-other, egocentric, allocentric processes.

[00:23:02.060] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

These shared representations are also similar to the current debates in collective cognition. Yeah, fantastic. You answered this in passing, but I want to ask it more directly, where do you see this research going next? Any new directions you are excited about?

[00:23:21.820] – Robert Chavez

Yeah. Some of the things we’re doing now are a little bit different. Rather than doing the trait-adjective task, which we’ve done a lot and is has its place, it’s trade adjectives. It’s okay, right? Is this person outgoing? Yes, no. What we’re doing now is rather than doing this in groups, which is hard, we’re doing it in diads, but we’re bringing in subjects to come tell us basically narratives about their lives. So we have them come into the lab before they go into the scanner. We get them to tell us stories about, Tell us about a high point in your life, a low point in your life. Tell us about your personal ideology. Tell us about the future, whatever. And we have people recording themselves, or we have people being recorded while they tell us this. And then we have their friend, their partner, their spouse, all kinds of other relationships, come in and do the same. Then we bring them back into the scanner later separately and have them listen to their own stories, have them listen to their friend’s stories, and then have them listen to a stranger’s stories as a control, so we can see where do people who are more close or less close to one another, sync up a little bit more, not just when they’re answering these trait-adjective task things, but when they’re really engaged in these deep narrative self-disclosure, listening to other disclosure things, which is much more naturalistic than these trade, these trade-adjective things that we’re doing.

[00:24:49.700] – Robert Chavez

So one criticism of our work might just be that, Hey, these trait-adjective tasks, they’re fine or whatever, but they’re not really capturing real social dynamics and how we pick up on information about others. And we’re hoping that this more naturalistic narrative task get a little bit closer to that. We’re still limited because the MRI machine is a noisy tube, which is about the least social place on the planet. But it’s at least a step towards a somewhat more reasonably naturalistic way in which we’re processing social information and share that between people we’re close to.

[00:25:27.660] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

I don’t know if you accept the requests for research questions, but I would be personally very interested in seeing these representations in formation in the longitudinal study, which would be, of course, very expensive within a fMRI study. But how we develop these representations when we meet someone and how they change over time.

[00:25:48.600] – Robert Chavez

Yeah, I agree. It would be fascinating. These round Robin designs like we did in this study, or even these dyadic designs are logistically challenging. You have to keep up with people. So making making sure that they come back for the follow-ups and everything is always a challenge. But it’s not insurmountable. People do these studies, I won’t say all the time, but they can be done, and that is part of our goal. We’re hoping to do more of this stuff and track people over time. So not only do you get the dynamics of listening to their stories online, but you get the longer term dynamics of how their relationship, closeness or intimacy or who knows, knowledge about one another changes is. You can start with strangers or you can start with people who know each other a little bit more closely. But I bet you there’s interesting stuff all over that place. I mean, I love to do that work.

[00:26:41.540] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

And is there anything else you would like to share with our listeners?

[00:26:47.820] – Robert Chavez

One thing I will share is, it’s a little bit of a trope if you ask my students, but of our recent paper in Psych Science, part of the reason I’m so proud of it is because it really does do what I said about in the beginning. It’s very interdisciplinary. We’re borrowing ideas from social psychology. We’re borrowing ideas from cognitive science. We’re borrowing tools and ideas from neuroimaging and MVPA and putting it all together. If you read the discussion, there’s things about Why would egocentric distance be like this in relation to mentalizing and empathy and whatnot? And there’s work in comparative animal studies that talk about self other distinctions in altruism across the phylogenetic chain. So there’s evolutionary ideas in there. So what I would tell everybody, especially earlier career researchers, is to not box yourself in, right? So to really lean into this interdisciplinary big picture thing. It can be so easy to fall into one category. But I think that’s where the action is. And I think that’s where the future of psychological science is going. It’s going to be not just in one domain digging in, but trying to connect the dots between seemingly disparate areas to pull together new, fresh perspectives on maybe even classic questions.

[00:28:10.300] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah. That’s why I think it is a good fit for our journal, Psych Science, It means because at APS, we care about interdisciplinarity a lot, too. Well, yeah, Robert, thank you so much for joining us today. This was a wonderful conversation.

[00:28:27.560] – Robert Chavez

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:28:30.000] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

This is Özge Gürcanli Fisher Baum Bohn with APS, and I have been speaking to Robert Chavez from the University of Oregon. If you want to know more about this research, visit psychologicalscience.org. Would you like to reach us? Send us your thoughts and questions at [email protected].