Social interactions often involve encountering inconsistent information about social others. We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to comprehensively investigate voxel-wise temporal dynamics showing how impressions are anchored and/or adjusted in response to inconsistent social information. The participants performed a social impression task inside an fMRI scanner in which they were shown a male face, together with a series of four adjectives that described the depicted person's personality traits, successively presented beneath the image of the face. Participants were asked to rate their impressions of the person at the end of each trial on a scale of 1 to 8 (where 1 is most negative and 8 is most positive). We established two hypothetical models that represented two temporal patterns of voxel activity: Model 1 featured decreasing patterns of activity towards the end of each trial, anchoring impressions to initially presented information, and Model 2 showed increasing patterns of activity toward the end of each trial, where impressions were being adjusted using new and inconsistent information. Our data-driven model fitting analyses showed that the temporal activity patterns of voxels within the ventral anterior cingulate cortex, medial orbitofrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, amygdala, and fusiform gyrus fit Model 1 (i.e., they were more involved in anchoring first impressions) better than they did Model 2 (i.e., showing impression adjustment). Conversely, voxel-wise neural activity within dorsal ACC and lateral OFC fit Model 2 better than it did Model 1, as it was more likely to be involved in processing new, inconsistent information and adjusting impressions in response. Our novel approach to model fitting analysis replicated previous impression-related neuroscientific findings, furthering the understanding of neural and temporal dynamics of impression processing, particularly with reference to functionally segmenting each region of interest based on relative involvement in impression anchoring as opposed to adjustment.

Although the concept of “common sense” is often taken for granted, judging whether behavior or knowledge is common sense requires a complex series of mental processes. Additionally, different perceptions of common sense can lead to social conflicts. Thus, it is important to understand how we perceive common sense and make relevant judgments. The present study investigated the dynamics of neural representations underlying judgments of what common sense is. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants indicated the extent to which they thought that a given sentence corresponded to common sense under the given perspective. We incorporated two different decision contexts involving different cultural perspectives to account for social variability of the judgments, an important feature of common sense judgments apart from logical true/false judgments. Our findings demonstrated that common sense versus non-common sense perceptions involve the amygdala and a brain network for episodic memory recollection, including the hippocampus, angular gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, suggesting integrated affective, mnemonic, and social functioning in common sense processing. Furthermore, functional connectivity multivariate pattern analysis revealed that interactivity among the amygdala, angular gyrus, and parahippocampal cortex reflected representational features of common sense perception and not those of non-common sense perception. Our study demonstrated that the social memory network is exclusively involved in processing common sense and not non-common sense. These results suggest that intergroup exclusion and misunderstanding can be reduced by experiencing and encoding long-term social memories about behavioral norms and knowledge that act as common sense of the outgroup.