Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Social value processing has been shown to recruit specific neural systems, yet how they are associated with person-specificinformation, such as facial identity, processed in separate regions remains to be established. The present study examinedchanges in neural representations in face-selective visual areas due to social value learning. Over four days, participantslearned combinations of social (generosity) and reward (point) values orthogonally assigned to naturalistic face images.We found that after learning, activity similarity (measured with fMRI) in the fusiform face area evoked by viewing thefaces was related to social value as well as a measure of future social preferences, but was not related to reward value. Thisshows how learned social values can influence representations in face-selective brain regions thought to primarily encodevisual information, and provides a potential neural mechanism for the association of social and visual information relevantto propensities in future social behavior.