Contributed Talk Sessions | Poster Sessions | All Posters | Search Papers

Contributed Talk Session: Thursday, August 14, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm, Room C1.04
Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Neural Representation of Social Relationship Graphs through Multidimensional Modeling of Dynamic Social Interactions

Dasom Kwon¹, Eshin Jolly, Luke Chang², Won Mok Shim³; ¹Sung Kyun Kwan University, ²Dartmouth College, ³SungKyunKwan University (SKKU)

Presenter: Dasom Kwon

Social interactions continuously evolve, shaping our understanding of interpersonal relationships. Yet, how does the human brain construct relational knowledge from such dynamics? Prior research has primarily relied on unidimensional co-occurrence metrics, failing to capture the complexity of real-world social dynamics. Here, we introduce a multidimensional modeling framework characterizing dynamic social interactions as valence-weighted graphs. Using fMRI data collected during movie-viewing and subsequent relationship rating tasks, we show that distributed brain regions track dynamic interactions and represent social relationship graphs. These representations were preserved across tasks, with higher dimensionality observed in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and lower dimensionality in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). These findings bridge online social perception and structured relational knowledge, elucidating how the brain organizes dynamic social interactions into multi-layered interpersonal relationship graphs.

Topic Area: Reward, Value & Social Decision Making

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF