Recognizing and remembering social information is a crucial cognitive skill. Neural patterns in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) support our ability to perceive others' social interactions. However, despite the prominence of social interactions in memory, the neural basis of remembering social interactions is still unknown. To fill this gap, we investigated the brain mechanisms underlying memory of others' social interactions during free spoken recall of a naturalistic movie. By applying machine learning-based fMRI encoding analyses to densely labeled movie and recall data we found that a subset of the STS activity evoked by viewing social interactions predicted neural responses in not only held-out movie data, but also during memory recall. These results provide the first evidence that activity in the STS is reinstated in response to specific social content and that its reactivation underlies our ability to remember others’ interactions. These findings further suggest that the STS contains representations of social interactions that are not only perceptually driven, but also more abstract or conceptual in nature.

中文翻译：

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用于感知和记忆人类颞上沟社交互动的共享神经代码

识别和记住社交信息是一项至关重要的认知技能。颞上沟 (STS) 中的神经模式支持我们感知他人社交互动的能力。然而，尽管社交互动在记忆中占据重要地位，但记住社交互动的神经基础仍然未知。为了填补这一空白，我们研究了在自然主义电影的自由言语回忆过程中对他人社交互动的记忆的大脑机制。通过将基于机器学习的功能磁共振成像编码分析应用于密集标记的电影和回忆数据，我们发现通过观看社交互动引发的 STS 活动的子集不仅可以预测保留的电影数据中的神经反应，还可以预测记忆回忆过程中的神经反应。这些结果提供了第一个证据，表明 STS 的活动会根据特定的社交内容而恢复，并且它的重新激活是我们记住他人互动的能力的基础。这些发现进一步表明，STS 包含社会互动的表征，这些表征不仅是感知驱动的，而且本质上更抽象或概念化。