Dr. Daniel Reznik | Dissociating and associating spatial and social representations in the human brain

One of the features that demarcates human species from the rest of the animal kingdom is the ability to develop and maintain complex social interactions. Despite a decades-long research, the neural architecture, organizational properties and evolutionary aspects of human social cognition are still poorly understood. In the current project, we build on recent developments in human neuroimaging, computational neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience to explore the nature and origin of human social cognition. We suggest that human social abilities have developed from the ability to navigate the physical world and that the neural basis for this development is the functional architecture of the human hippocampal system. Similar to the way we map the physical environment into a concrete, Euclidian space, our social world may be arranged as an abstract relational trait-framework mapped onto a “social space”. Using state-of-the-art neuroimaging and analysis tools, the proposed project aims to examine shared and distinct coding principles of human spatial and social functions, and explore the hippocampus-related anatomical framework within which these functions must operate.