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Poster F in Poster Session F: Thursday, August 6, 1:45 – 3:30 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Human Hippocampal Neurons Track Latent Social Position

Gelana Tostaeva¹, Katherine Belilty¹, Salman Qasim¹, Fedor Panov¹, Daniela Schiller¹, Ignacio Saez¹; ¹Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Presenter: Gelana Tostaeva

Adaptive social behavior requires tracking others in a latent relational state space. Prior work suggests that the hippocampus supports abstract cognitive maps (Behrens et al., 2018), but whether single human neurons encode latent social coordinates is unknown. We recorded 327 well-isolated neurons from hippocampus, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), and amygdala in neurosurgical patients performing a social navigation task (Tavares et al., 2015) in which interactions with five characters updated their positions along latent affiliation and power dimensions. We found that a significant subset of hippocampal neurons encoded characters’ two-dimensional location in social space, with place-field-like responses not explained by affiliation or power alone. Hippocampal neurons also encoded egocentric social angle and distance, consistent with a self-referenced geometric code. Complementary continuous analyses further showed that both hippocampus and OFC carried information about latent social coordinates, but in different formats: hippocampal coding was evident in both focal and continuous measures, whereas OFC coding was stronger in parametric and information-based analyses than in bin-based selectivity tests. These results provide single-neuron evidence that the human hippocampus tracks locations in abstract social space and suggest that hippocampal–OFC circuits may implement complementary codes for latent social states.

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures