Learning who’s the top dog

A new study in the journal Neuron reveals how the brain stores information about who's who in the social pecking order. The work, which was led by UCL and supported by the Wellcome Trust, shows that we use a different part of our brain to learn about social hierarchies than we do to learn ordinary information. The study provides clues as to how this information is stored in memory and also reveals that you can tell a lot about how good somebody is likely to be at judging social rank by looking at the structure of their brain. Primates (and people) are remarkably good at ranking each other within social hierarchies, a survival technique that helps us to avoid conflict and select advantageous allies. However, we know surprisingly little about how the brain does this. The team at the UCL Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience used brain imaging techniques to investigate this process in twenty six healthy volunteers. Participants were asked to play a simple science fiction computer game where they would be acting as future investors.