Biology subjects

Jolly, E.

Publications and source records attributed to Jolly, E..

7 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Neural representations of dynamic social interactions

Humans readily infer others attributes and their complex web of social relationships from everyday social interactions. Yet, the neural mechanisms that transform these transient interactions into structured, multidimensional social knowledge remain unknown. Here, using a naturalistic fMRI paradigm, we develop a computational framework demonstrating how the human brain factorizes and integrates dynamic social interactions to construct multiplex social knowledge. This approach not only predicts neural responses during movie-viewing, but also enables the reconstruction of subjective social cognitive maps directly from brain activity. Crucially, the relational geometry of these reconstructed maps accurately predicts inferred personality traits, suggesting that relational and trait knowledge emerge from a shared neural representation reflecting interactional dynamics. Together, these findings provide a unifying computational framework for how the brain constructs multiplex social knowledge from observing naturalistic social interactions over time.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Structured Neural Variability from Repeated Naturalistic Video Watching Experiences

The brain continuously integrates perception and interpretation processes to navigate dynamic environments. It is often assumed that these processes are invariant to repeated experiences. Here we investigated how neural responses to naturalistic stimuli evolve across multiple viewings using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Twenty participants watched 24 short videos across five separate scanning sessions. Between-subject correlations (BSC) decreased progressively across all brain regions with repeated viewing, indicating increasing individual variability. Within-subject correlations (WSC) consistently exceeded BSC, demonstrating that individuals are more similar to themselves than to others. However, the structure of within-subject variability differed fundamentally between sensory and interpretive regions. Early visual cortex exhibited strong repetition effects, with brain activity becoming increasingly dissimilar with each successive viewing, accompanied by reduced coupling to low-level visual features and decreased anti-correlation with default mode regions. In contrast, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) showed temporal proximity effects, where sessions closer in time exhibited more similar activity patterns regardless of viewing number. This temporal structure in vmPFC aligned with fluctuations in participants video preferences across sessions. These findings suggest that repeated experiences are never processed identically: sensory systems adapt efficiently to familiar input while interpretive systems continuously reshape meaning based on current internal states.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Shared and individual tuning curves for social vision

Stimuli with light are clearly visual; stimuli with sound are clearly auditory. But what makes a stimulus "social", and how do socialness judgments differ across people? Here, we characterize group-level and individual thresholds for perceiving the presence and nature of a social interaction. We leverage the fact that humans see social interactions--e.g., chasing, playing, fighting--even in very un-lifelike stimuli like animations of geometric shapes. Unlike most prior work that used hand-crafted stimuli, we exploit these animations most advantageous property: their visual features are fully parameterizable. Using this property, we construct psychophysics-inspired "social tuning curves" for individuals. We find not only that simple visual features influence social perception, but also that the exact shape of the tuning curve is unique to and stable within each person. Further, individual differences in tuning curves are related to socio-affective traits. Our approach lays the foundation to study how social percepts emerge from interactions between features of a stimulus and features of an individual observer.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Custom-molded headcases have limited efficacy in reducing head motion for fMRI

Effectively minimizing head motion continues to be a challenge for the collection of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. The use of individual-specific custom molded headcases is a promising solution to this issue, but there has been limited work to date. In the present work, we examine the efficacy of headcases in a larger group of participants engaged in naturalistic scanning paradigms including: long movie-watching scans ([~]20-45min) and a recall task that involved talking aloud inside the MRI. Unlike previous work, we find that headcases do not reliably reduce motion during movie viewing compared to alternative methods such as foam pillows or foam pillows plus medical tape. Surprisingly, we also find that motion is worse when participants talk aloud while wearing headcases. These differences appear to be driven by large, brief rotations of the head as well as translations in the z-plane as participants speak. Smaller, constant head movements appear equivalent with or without headcases. The largest reductions in head motion are observable when participants were situated with both foam pillows and medical tape. Altogether, this work suggests that in a healthy adult population, custom-molded headcases may provide limited efficacy in reducing head motion beyond existing tools available to researchers. We hope this work can help improve the quality of custom headcases, motivate the investigation of additional solutions, and provide additional information about head motion in naturalistic contexts.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

The hidden cost of receiving favors: A theory of indebtedness

Receiving help or a favor from another person can sometimes have a hidden cost for the beneficiary. In this study, we explore these hidden costs by developing and validating a conceptual model of indebtedness across three studies that combine a large scale online questionnaire, an interpersonal game, computational modeling, and neuroimaging. Our model captures how individuals perceive the altruistic and strategic intentions of the benefactor. These inferences produce distinct feelings of guilt and obligation that together comprise indebtedness and motivate reciprocity. Perceived altruistic intentions convey care and concern and are associated with activity in insula, ventromedial prefrontal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, while inferred strategic intentions convey expectations of future reciprocity and are associated with activation in temporal parietal junction and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. We further develop a neural utility model of indebtedness using multivariate patterns of brain activity that captures the tradeoff between these feelings and reliably predicts reciprocity behavior.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Inter-subject representational similarity analysis reveals individual variations in affective experience when watching erotic movies

We spend much of our life pursuing or avoiding affective experiences. However, surprisingly little is known about how these experiences are represented in the brain and if they are shared across individuals. Here, we explore variations in the construction of an affective experience during a naturalistic viewing paradigm based on subjective preferences in sociosexual desire and self-control using intersubject representational similarity analysis (IS-RSA). We found that when watching erotic movies, intersubject variations in sociosexual desire preferences of 26 heterosexual males were associated with similarly structured fluctuations in the cortico-striatal reward, default mode, and mentalizing networks. In contrast, variations in the self-control preferences were associated with shared dynamics in the fronto-parietal executive control and cingulo-insula salience networks. Importantly, these results were specific to the affective experience, as we did not observe any relationship with variation in preferences when individuals watched neutral movies. Moreover, these results appear to require multivariate representations of preferences as we did not observe any significant results using single summary scores. Our findings demonstrate that multidimensional variations in individual preferences can be used to uncover unique dimensions of an affective experience, and that IS-RSA can provide new insights into the neural processes underlying psychological experiences elicited through naturalistic experimental designs.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Endogenous variation in ventromedial prefrontal cortex state dynamics during naturalistic viewing reflects affective experience

How we process ongoing experiences is shaped by our personal history, current needs, and future goals. Consequently, brain regions involved in generating these subjective appraisals, such as the vmPFC, often appear to be heterogeneous across individuals even in response to the same external information. To elucidate the role of the vmPFC in processing our ongoing experiences, we developed a computational framework and analysis pipeline to characterize the spatiotemporal dynamics of individual vmPFC responses as participants viewed a 45-minute television drama. Through a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging, facial expression tracking, and self-reported emotional experiences across four studies, our data suggest that the vmPFC slowly transitions through a series of discretized states that broadly map onto affective experiences. Although these transitions typically occur at idiosyncratic times across people, participants exhibited a marked increase in state alignment during high affectively valenced events in the show. Our work suggests that the vmPFC ascribes affective meaning to our ongoing experiences.

neuroscience↗