Biology subjects

Deen, B.

Publications and source records attributed to Deen, B..

6 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Developing a behavioral measure of social memory from narrative video

Understanding other people relies on long-term memory: we use learned information about others' personalities, mental states, and personal histories to make inferences about the causes of their behavior. However, little is known about individual differences in memory for high-level social information. Here, we develop and psychometrically evaluate a behavioral measure of social memory from narrative video content. Participants (N = 103) watched the pilot episode of the TV show Friday Night Lights, and answered multiple choice questions about characters' actions, statements, inferred mental states, relationships, and personalities immediately after viewing and following a 21-day delay. The social memory task showed moderate split-half reliability, demonstrating feasibility as an individual difference measure. Memory for information about specific events in the narrative showed a decline across the delay, while memory for abstract information remained stable. Social memory performance was correlated with separate measures of face-name association and verbal episodic memory, but not with face image recognition memory. These results provide a proof of concept for a novel behavioral measure of social memory and suggest that the measure relates to episodic and relational memory but not image recognition.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Three distinct profiles of visual category preference within the anterior temporal lobe

The primate visual hierarchy culminates in the anterior temporal lobe (ATL), yet the functional organization of this region remains poorly understood due to magnetic susceptibility artifacts that degrade fMRI signal quality. Here, we leverage a large-scale fMRI dataset from the Human Connectome Project (N = 830, male and female) to characterize visual category preferences within the ATL using a region-of-interest-based approach providing sensitivity in signal-compromised areas. Within the temporal pole (TP) and perirhinal cortex (PR), we identified three distinct profiles of visual category response, each replicated in an independent sample. TP showed a preference for objects over scenes, with a right-hemisphere bias toward animate objects (faces and bodies) over inanimate objects (tools). PR contained two functionally distinct subregions: one preferring faces over other categories, and one responding broadly to objects -- particularly tools and bodies--over scenes. Analysis of spatial location revealed that, unlike the well-characterized topographic organization of category-sensitive regions in posterior occipitotemporal cortex, face- and object-preferring subregions of PR did not show a consistent spatial relationship, suggesting a patchy or "salt-and-pepper" organization. Resting-state functional connectivity analyses demonstrated that ATL subregions have dissociable connectivity profiles: TP showed preferential connectivity with transmodal default mode network regions, while PR subregions were more strongly coupled with occipitotemporal cortex, with each showing preferential connectivity with regions sharing similar category preferences. Together, these findings demonstrate that category sensitivity--a hallmark of the ventral visual stream--extends to the apex of the cortical visual hierarchy. Significance statementUnderstanding the functional organization of the visual system is a central goal of cognitive and systems neuroscience. The anterior temporal lobe (ATL) sits at the top of the brains visual processing hierarchy and is critical for recognizing objects and people, but its internal organization has remained poorly characterized due to technical limitations in brain imaging. Our findings resolve a key gap by demonstrating that the same organizational principle governing the well-studied posterior visual system--the segregation of responses by object category--extends all the way to the apex of the visual hierarchy. This lays essential groundwork for future research understanding interactions between visual and memory systems, and how high-level visual processing breaks down in neurological conditions affecting the ATL.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

The MTL200: a surface-based, probabilistic atlas of the medial temporal lobe

The human medial temporal lobe (MTL) includes a number of cortical regions surrounding the hippocampus implicated in long-term memory and high-level perception, including temporopolar cortex (TPC), entorhinal cortex (ERC), perirhinal cortex (PRC), and parahippocampal cortex (PHC). A critical prerequisite to studying the function of these areas is to define their anatomical boundaries. While several atlases or segmentations methods for automated boundary definition exist, they have limitations: 1) they are derived from small sample sizes; 2) most do not include TPC; and 3) they are volumetric rather than surface-based and are therefore not straightforward to use for surface-based analysis of MRI data. Here we present the MTL200: a surface-based, probabilistic atlas of MTL regions TPC, ERC, PRC, and PHC. The atlas is derived from hand drawings of regions based on gross anatomical features corresponding to cytoarchitectonic boundaries, using anatomical MRI data from 200 human participants. This work provides a valuable tool for researchers studying the anatomy and function of MTL regions, particularly the poorly characterized area TPC.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Data retention in awake infant fMRI: Lessons from more than 750 scanning sessions

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses significant methodological challenges that have hampered wider adoption. The present work takes stock after the collection of a substantial amount of awake infant fMRI data across multiple studies from two labs at different institutions. These data were leveraged to glean insights on participant recruitment, experimental design, and data acquisition that could be useful to consider for future studies. Across 766 fMRI sessions with awake infants aged 1-36 months, the authors explored the factors that influenced how much usable data were obtained per session. The age of an infant predicted whether they would successfully enter the scanner (younger more likely) and, if they did enter, the number of minutes of functional data collected (linear, younger more) and retained after preprocessing with lab-specific protocols or harmonized motion exclusion thresholds (quadratic, 12-24 months more than younger and older). The amount of functional data retained was also influenced by assigned sex (female more), experimental paradigm (movies better than blocks and events), and stimulus content (social better than abstract). There were many differences in the research approach between labs making head-to-head comparisons difficult, but Yale was more likely to get infants into the scanner, MIT collected more data from infants who entered, and the amount of data retained after preprocessing did not differ statistically between labs (9 minutes). In addition, the authors assessed the value of attempting to collect multiple experiments per session, an approach that yielded more than one usable experiment averaging across all sessions. Although any given scan is unpredictable, these findings support the feasibility of awake infant fMRI and suggest practices to optimize future research.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

A familiar face and person processing area in the human temporal pole

How does the brain process the faces of familiar people? Neuropsychological studies have argued for an area of the temporal pole (TP) linking faces with person identities, but magnetic susceptibility artifacts in this region have hampered its study with fMRI. Using data acquisition and analysis methods optimized to overcome this artifact, we identify a familiar face response in TP, reliably observed in individual brains. This area responds strongly to visual images of familiar faces over images of unfamiliar faces, objects, and scenes. However, TP did not just respond to images of faces, but also to a variety of high-level cognitive tasks that involve thinking about people, including semantic, episodic, and theory of mind tasks. The response profile of TP contrasted from a nearby region of perirhinal cortex that responded specifically to faces, but not to social cognition tasks. TP was functionally connected with a distributed network in association cortex associated with social cognition, while PR was functionally connected with face-preferring areas of ventral visual cortex. This work identifies a missing link in the human familiar face processing system that specifically processes familiar faces, and is well placed to integrate visual information about faces with higher-order conceptual information about other people. The results suggest that separate streams for person and face processing reach anterior temporal areas positioned at the top of the cortical hierarchy.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Parallel systems for social and spatial reasoning within the cortical apex

What is the cognitive and neural architecture for high-level reasoning? We hypothesize that systems for understanding people and places remain separate throughout the brain, but share a parallel organization. We test this hypothesis using deep neuroimaging of individual human brains on diverse tasks involving reasoning and memory about familiar people, places, and objects. We find that thinking about people and places elicits responses in distinct areas of high-level association cortex, spanning the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes. Person- and place-preferring brain regions are systematically yoked across cortical zones. These areas have strongly domain-specific response profiles across visual, semantic, and episodic tasks, and are specifically functionally connected to other parts of association cortex with like category preference. Social and spatial networks are anatomically separated even at the top of the cortical hierarchy, and include parts of cortex with anatomical connections to the hippocampal formation. These results demonstrate parallel, domain-specific networks within the cortical apex. They suggest that domain-specific systems for reasoning constitute components of a broader cortico-hippocampal system for long-term memory.

neuroscience↗