Individual Differences in Learning Social and Non-Social Network Structures

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social network learning
statistical learning
social cognition
Cognition and Perception
Cognitive Psychology
Communication
Community Psychology
Interpersonal and Small Group Communication
Personality and Social Contexts
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Social Psychology
Statistics and Probability
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Tompson, Steven
Kahn, Ari E
Vettel, Jean M
Bassett, Danielle S
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Abstract

How do people acquire knowledge about which individuals belong to different cliques or communities? And to what extent does this learning process differ from the process of learning higher-order information about complex associations between non-social bits of information? Here, we employ a paradigm in which the order of stimulus presentation forms temporal associations between the stimuli, collectively constituting a complex network. We examined individual differences in the ability to learn community structure of networks composed of social versus non-social stimuli. Although participants were able to learn community structure of both social and non-social networks, their performance in social network learning was uncorrelated with their performance in non-social network learning. In addition, social traits, including social orientation and perspective-taking, uniquely predicted the learning of social community structure but not the learning of non-social community structure. Taken together, our results suggest that the process of learning higher-order community structure in social networks is partially distinct from the process of learning higher-order community structure in non-social networks. Our study design provides a promising approach to identify neurophysiological drivers of social network versus non-social network learning, extending our knowledge about the impact of individual differences on these learning processes.

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2018-01-01
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