The Neural Representations of Social Status: An MVPA Study

Abstract

Status is a salient social cue, to the extent that it shapes our attention, judgment, and memory for other people, and it guides our social interactions. While prior work has addressed the traits associated with status, as well as its effects on cognition and behavior, research on the neural mechanisms of status perception is still relatively sparse and predominantly focused on neural activity during explicit status judgments. Further, there is no research looking at the involvement of person-processing networks in status perception, or how we embed status information in our representations of others. In the present study I asked whether person-specific representations in ventral face-processing regions (occipital face area (OFA), fusiform face area (FFA)) as well as more anterior regions (anterior temporal lobe (ATL) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)) contain information about a person’s status, and whether regions involved in affective processing and reward (amygdala, ventral striatum) decode status information as well. Participants learned to associate names, career titles, and reputational status information (high versus low ratings) with objects and faces over a two-day training regimen. Object status served as a nonsocial comparison. Trained stimuli were presented in an fMRI experiment, where participants performed a target detection task unrelated to status. MVPA revealed that face and object sensitive regions in the ATLs and lateral OFC decoded face and object status, respectively. These data suggest that regions sensitive to abstract person knowledge and valuation interact during the perception of social status, potentially contributing to the effects of status on social perception.