Our memories of social interactions

Where in the brain do we form memories of our social interactions? Researchers from both France and Canada have identified the internal part of the prefrontal cortex as an essential region for the memory formation of social information. They used fMRI imaging on 17 volunteers as they performed memory tasks. These memory tasks contained social scenes and nonsocial scenes. From these scans they identified the medial prefrontal cortex as the area that is important for the encoding of our social interactions in an image.

Previous research performed by the same researcher identified the same prefrontal region as being the key structure for processes of thinking about oneself and others. This research will serve to be important in the understanding of social and personality disorders like antisocial personality disorder. The antisocial behavior that these people engage in could be a result of some deficiency in the medial prefrontal cortex.

The article can be found here:
http://www.emaxhealth.com/7/11177.html