Our brains use basic 'building blocks' of information to keep track of how people interact, enabling us to navigate complex social interactions, finds a new study led by University College London (UCL) researchers.
For the study, published in Nature, the researchers scanned the brains of participants who were playing a simple game involving a teammate and two opponents, to see how their brains were able to keep track of information about the group of players.
The scientists found that rather than keeping track of the performance of each individual player, specific parts of the participants' brains would react to specific patterns of interaction, or 'building blocks' of information that could be combined to understand what was going on.
Lead author Dr Marco Wittmann (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research) said: "Humans are social creatures that are capable of keeping track of highly complex and fluid social dynamics, requiring a massive amount of brain power to remember not only individual people but also the various relationships between them.
