rpSTS Stimulation Disrupts Shared Neural Responses to Social Content during Naturalistic Viewing
Shared understanding of common experiences can foster feelings of social closeness and friendship, and help us understand those experiences. Recent work has suggested that patterns of neural activity shared across individuals, especially throughout the default mode network, may underlie shared representations. Here we used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and functional…
A study utilizing repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging during movie watching has revealed that the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (rpSTS) plays a crucial role in shared neural patterns for common experiences. The findings, published in <source 379cc849-287>, demonstrate that rTMS selectively impairs social feature encoding in rpSTS without affecting low-level visual encoding in early visual cortex.
This selective disruption of social information encoding was associated with reduced memory and intersubject pattern similarity in the default mode network (DMN) and limbic networks during scenes central to the movie narrative. Moreover, projecting scene embeddings onto NLP-based concept axes showed reductions in memory and neural pattern similarity for scenes depicting helplessness and empathy following rTMS.
The results provide strong causal evidence that rpSTS is a key region responsible for encoding shared social information into common neural representations. The study further suggests that disrupting the input to rpSTS causes the DMN representations to become more individualized and less aligned with shared social experiences.
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