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Social hierarchy is an ubiquitous principle of social organization across animal species. Although some progress has been made to understand how humans infer hierarchical identity, the neuroanatomical basis for perceiving key social dimensions of others remains unexplored. Here, we combined Event Related Potentials and structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging to reveal the neuroanatomical substrates of early status recognition. We designed a covertly simulated hierarchical setting where participants performed a task either with a superior or with an inferior player. Participants showed higher amplitude in the N170 component when presented with a picture of a superior player compared to an inferior player. Crucially, the magnitude of this effect correlated with brain morphology of the posterior cingulate cortex, superior temporal gyrus, insula, fusiform gyrus and caudate nucleus. We conclude that early recognition of social hierarchies relies on the structural properties of a network involved in the automatic recognition of social identity which is involved in processing social cognition. Crucially, morpholgy of this network has been related to deficits in social cognition (in particular, processes as social recognition, emotional empathy processing, and mentalizing of other's intentions) in patients with autism spectrum disorders and fronto temporal dementia. Here, we revise the temporal dynamics of social recognition and its neuroanatomical markers and we discuss the implication of these results in the comprehension of the social processing in patients with mental disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social hierarchies modulate cognitive processes. Nevertheless, the study of the influence of social hierarchy on sentence comprehension is scarce. We presented sentences with different levels of plausibility uttered by speakers with different hierarchical status (as previously established through a hierarchical video game) and measured the modulations of the N400 component. Participants heard three subsets of sentences with different plausibility value, depending on the last word (high, intermediate and low-plausibility). Sentences could be spoken by a superior or by an inferior status player. When listening to the superior player, the modulation of the N400 component followed the expected pattern (inverse relationship between amplitudes and sentence plausibility). However, when participants heard the Inferior speaker the amplitude of the N400 in high plausible sentences matched that of intermediate plausibility (increased). This result indicated that participants’ did not trust low rank speakers, even if sentences were high-plausible. We have observed specific personality traits modulating these hierarchical influences. The present research sets the ground for future studies exploring the influence of social hierarchies in other cognitive domains, specifically in relevant mental disorders where the social cognition is a nuclear field of symptoms such as the anxiety and other obssesive compulsive spectrum disorders. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]