Carolyn Parkinson: University of California, Los Angeles

The cognitive demands of navigating large groups comprised of many varied and enduring social bonds are thought to have significantly shaped human brain evolution. Yet, much remains to be understood about how the human brain tracks, encodes, and is influenced by the social networks in which it is embedded. The work presented in this talk integrates approaches from social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and social network analysis in order to better understand how the structure of the social world is encoded in the human brain and the cognitive consequences of this structure.