Our Professor Just Published a Breakthrough Study on the Social Brain
We’re incredibly proud to share that our very own Prof. Elisabeth Friedrich-Higgs – together with fantastic collaborators – has just published a landmark study in Communications Psychology — a Nature Portfolio journal.
One Brain System Rules Them All
It was assumed that juggling information in your mind and understanding others are driven by different brain mechanisms. Prof. Friedrich and her collaborators just proved otherwise.
Using EEG recordings from 98 participants, they showed that a region behind your forehead — the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) — acts as a master conductor for both visual working memory and social cognition, through the same rhythmic signaling mechanism: theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling.
What Changes with Autistic Traits?
The study found a meaningful difference between subclinical individuals with low and high autistic personality traits
- People with low autistic personality traits flexibly fine-tuned their brain’s coupling as social and cognitive tasks got harder
- People with higher autistic personality traits struggled with this fine-tuning — and this could explain real behavioral difficulties in demanding visual and social cognition tasks.
Identifying this brain communication pattern may help explain why people differ in social understanding and handling mental workload — and could guide approaches that apply across different mental health conditions.
Why This Matters to Us
Understanding the neural roots of social cognition is foundational to building more inclusive workplaces, organizations, and communities — exactly the kind of human-centered thinking that drives our mission at the University of Sustainability. Science like this is why we believe that studying people is studying sustainability.
👉 Read the full open-access study here.
Congratulations, Prof. Friedrich-Higgs — this is the kind of work that moves the world forward. 🎉