Ventromedial prefrontal volume predicts understanding of others and social network size

By Penelope A. Lewis, Roozbeh Rezaie, Rachel M. Brown, Neil Roberts, Robin I. M. Dunbar. NeuroImage, 2011

315 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cognitive abilities such as Theory of Mind (ToM), and more generally mentalizing competences, are central to human sociality. Neuroimaging has associated these abilities with specific brain regions including temporo-parietal junction, superior temporal sulcus, frontal pole, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Previous studies have shown both that mentalizing competence, indexed as the ability to correctly understand others’ belief states, is associated with social network size and that social group size is correlated with frontal lobe volume across primate species (the social brain hypothesis). Given this, we predicted that both mentalizing competences and the number of social relationships a person can maintain simultaneously will be a function of grey matter volume in these regions associated with conventional theory of mind. We used voxel-based morphometry of Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs) to test this hypothesis in humans. Specifically, we regressed individuals’ mentalizing competences and social network sizes against grey matter volume. This revealed that grey matter volume in bilateral posterior frontal pole and left temporoparietal junction and superior temporal sucus varies parametrically with mentalizing competence. Furthermore, grey matter volume in the medial orbitofrontal cortex and the ventral portion of medial frontal gyrus, varied parametrically with both mentalizing competence and social network size, demonstrating a shared neural basis for these very different facets of sociality. These findings provide the first fine-grained anatomical support for the social brain hypothesis. As such, they have important implications for our understanding of the constraints limiting social cognition and social network size in humans, as well as for our understanding of how such abilities evolved across primates.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ee8fdcf4d5dbb321b1706c546f649d8d6a0a84ff

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Citations in the corpus

The brain opioid theory of social attachment: a review of the evidence (2011, background): “…endorphins in the reward system is emphasised by the fact that there is a particularly high density of opioid receptors in the orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the prefrontal cortex that is explicitly associated with both reward and, importantly, sociality (Powell et al., 2010; Lewis et al., 2011).”
The structure of online social networks mirrors those in the offline world (2015, result): “This proposal has since been given considerable support by evidence from a series of neuroimaging studies which have shown, for both humans (Lewis et al. 2011, Powell et al. 2012, 2014, Kanai et al. 2012) and monkeys (Sallet et al. 2013), that within-species variation in social network size…”
The Neurobiology of Social Distance (2020, unknown): “, [51,91]) broadly confirm that our online social networks correlate with the volumes of the same core brain regions that resonate with the size of our offline networks [52,92].”
Are there specialized circuits for social cognition and are they unique to humans? (2013, background): “Although some social skills might be uniquely human, for example ‘Theory of Mind’ — the inferring of another’s beliefs and intentions [18 ], there are likely to be other more basic social skills that are possessed by a range of primates.”
Gratitude and Subjective Wellbeing: A Proposal of Two Causal Frameworks (2017, background): “…the tendency to feel grateful after benefitting from someone’s generosity, was uniquely associated with greater gray matter volume in the right inferior temporal lobe (Zahn et al. 2014), an area previously associated with competence in interpreting the intentions of others (Lewis et al. 2011).”