# The Neural Basis of Social Knowledge

> **NIH NIH R56** · TEMPLE UNIV OF THE COMMONWEALTH · 2020 · $375,196

## Abstract

Project Summary
Humans live in large social groups. The requirements of living in such groups may have led to the evolution of
language and as well as larger brains. Underpinning our superior social skills is a vast storehouse of social
knowledge. For instance, our ability to recognize other individuals and retrieve information about who they are,
what their relationship is to us, their position in a social hierarchy, even their personality traits, all relies on a
social brain that is tightly linked to declarative memory systems. In addition, our ability to understand and
engage in mentalizing, our use of stereotypes and categories, the application of socio-cultural norms about
status, hierarchy, and etiquette, as well as the ability to understand the intent, rather than the concrete
meaning, of speech, all rely heavily on stored knowledge. Here we propose to extend our prior work that
identified a flexible circuit that allows us to retrieve different types of person knowledge, with a putative person
identity node in the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) at the center of it. We will use multivariate fMRI and
representational similarity analysis, as well as structural and functional connectivity analyses, to examine the
flexible interaction of this region with perceptual systems, episodic memory systems, and the greater social
brain. Success in this project will significantly advance our understanding of the basic neural mechanisms that
contribute to high-level social processing and will have important clinical implications for disorders that have
core social knowledge deficits such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10189904
- **Project number:** 2R56MH091113-11
- **Recipient organization:** TEMPLE UNIV OF THE COMMONWEALTH
- **Principal Investigator:** Ingrid R Olson
- **Activity code:** R56 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $375,196
- **Award type:** 2
- **Project period:** 2020-09-14 → 2023-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10189904

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10189904, The Neural Basis of Social Knowledge (2R56MH091113-11). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10189904. Licensed CC0.

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