Tatiana Lau (Student Talk Series)

Inferring "Us" and “Them” through Latent Structure Learning

Humans form social coalitions in every society on earth, yet little is known about how we learn and represent social group boundaries. Previous research has focused on group inference through explicit information (e.g., team memberships and visual cues). How do we accumulate information from the environment to infer social group membership when such labels are not explicitly available? We derive predictions from a computational model of latent structure learning to move beyond explicit category labels and dyadic similarity as the sole inputs to social group representations. Our behavioral results indicate that people integrate information about how other agents in the environment relate to one another in addition to oneself in order to infer social group structure. These latent structures then influence participants’ choices regarding with whom they want to align and trait attributions made about these agents (i.e., accounting for similarity, agents who cluster with participants are judged more moral, warm, and competent). Additionally, using a model-based analysis of functional neuroimaging data, we find that separate areas correlate with the dyadic similarity and latent structure learning models. In line with previous work on reflecting on oneself and similar others, trial-by-trial updating regarding dyadic similarity between participants and each agent recruited medial prefrontal cortex/pregenual anterior cingulate (pgACC). Trial-by-trial latent structure updating, on the other hand, recruited right anterior insula (rAI). A comparison of our rAI cluster with an independently identified ROI of cluster structure updating revealed a 44.7 percent overlap. Additionally, variability in the brain signal from this cluster significantly improved prediction of variability in choice behavior, whereas variability from the pgACC did not. These results provide novel insights into the psychological and neural underpinnings of how people learn who is “us” and who is “them”.