Voxel-wise Mapping of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Impression Formation

Abstract

Social interactions often involve encountering inconsistent information about social others. We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to comprehensively investigate voxel-wise temporal dynamics showing how impressions are anchored and/or adjusted in response to inconsistent social information. The participants performed a social impression task inside an fMRI scanner in which they were shown a male face, together with a series of four adjectives that described the depicted person's personality traits, successively presented beneath the image of the face. Participants were asked to rate their impressions of the person at the end of each trial on a scale of 1 to 8 (where 1 is most negative and 8 is most positive). We established two hypothetical models that represented two temporal patterns of voxel activity: Model 1 featured decreasing patterns of activity towards the end of each trial, anchoring impressions to initially presented information, and Model 2 showed increasing patterns of activity toward the end of each trial, where impressions were being adjusted using new and inconsistent information. Our data-driven model fitting analyses showed that the temporal activity patterns of voxels within the ventral anterior cingulate cortex, medial orbitofrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, amygdala, and fusiform gyrus fit Model 1 (i.e., they were more involved in anchoring first impressions) better than they did Model 2 (i.e., showing impression adjustment). Conversely, voxel-wise neural activity within dorsal ACC and lateral OFC fit Model 2 better than it did Model 1, as it was more likely to be involved in processing new, inconsistent information and adjusting impressions in response. Our novel approach to model fitting analysis replicated previous impression-related neuroscientific findings, furthering the understanding of neural and temporal dynamics of impression processing, particularly with reference to functionally segmenting each region of interest based on relative involvement in impression anchoring as opposed to adjustment.