Innovators in
Cognitive Neuroscience

Tatiana Lau

Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

March 24, 2021

Charitable cause:
Alight (formerly American Refugee Committee)

Title:
Discovering social groups via latent structure learning

Abstract:
Social groups exist in every society. One crucial process to the functioning of social groups is social categorization—being able to recognize in- and out-group members (i.e., “us” and “them”). Past work suggests that we can do this via dyadic similarity—specific, static, salient features we share directly with others (e.g., race). Yet, in our increasingly diverse societies where explicit cues such as skin tone may not be consistently reliable signals of group membership, how can we identify in- and out-group members? I present studies suggesting that, in contrast to dyadic similarity accounts, a domain-general model of latent structure learning may be a more comprehensive explanation of social categorization. I also examine the neural correlates of both models and discuss more recent work that applies this novel account to larger observational datasets.

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