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SOCIAL DECISION-MAKING

Navigating social knowledge

Everyday phrases like ‘top dog’ and ‘low status’ suggest that we may mentally represent social and spatial information similarly. To what extent is that true? New research suggests that, like physical space, social knowledge is encoded as a cognitive map in the human brain and represented with a grid-like code.

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Fig. 1: Investigating the encoding and navigation of social knowledge.

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Correspondence to Meng Du or Carolyn Parkinson.

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Du, M., Parkinson, C. Navigating social knowledge. Nat Neurosci 24, 1195–1197 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-021-00900-x

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