Brain Activity Tracks Population Information Sharing by Capturing Consensus Judgments of Value
Abstract
Information that is shared widely can profoundly shape society. Evidence from neuroimaging suggests that activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a core region of the brain’s valuation system tracks with this sharing. However, the mechanisms linking vmPFC responses in individuals to population behavior are still unclear. We used a multilevel brain-as-predictor approach to address this gap, finding that individual differences in how closely vmPFC activity corresponded with population news article sharing related to how closely its activity tracked with social consensus about article value. Moreover, how closely vmPFC activity corresponded with population behavior was linked to daily life news experience: frequent news readers tended to show high vmPFC across all articles, whereas infrequent readers showed high vmPFC only to articles that were more broadly valued and heavily shared. Using functional connectivity analyses, we found that superior tracking of consensus value was related to decreased connectivity of vmPFC with a dorsolateral PFC region associated with controlled processing. Taken together, our results demonstrate variability in the brain’s capacity to track crowd wisdom about information value, and suggest (lower levels of) stimulus experience and vmPFC–dlPFC connectivity as psychological and neural sources of this variability.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Aug 28, 2018
- Source ID
- 10.1093/cercor/bhy176
Entities
People
- B P Doré
- C Scholz
- Danielle Bassett
- E. B. Falk
- Elisa C. Baek
- J O Garcia
- J. M. Vettel
- M B O’donnell
Organizations
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- National Institutes of Health
- United States Army Research Laboratory
- University of California, Santa Barbara
- University of Pennsylvania