FLICKR, SAGESOLARAt least one type of social learning, or the ability to learn from observing others’ actions, is processed by individual neurons within a region of the human brain called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), according to a study published today (September 6) in Nature Communications. The work is the first direct analysis in humans of the neuronal activity that encodes information about others’ behavior.
“The idea [is] that there could be an area that’s specialized for processing things about other people,” says Matthew Apps, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford who was not involved with the study. “How we think about other people might use distinct processes from how we might think about ourselves.”
During the social learning experiments, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and CalTech–based research team recorded the activity of individual neurons in the brains of epilepsy patients. The patients were undergoing a weeks-long procedure at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in which their brains were implanted with electrodes to locate the origin of their epileptic seizures. Access to this patient population was key to the study. “It’s a very rare dataset,” says ...
