Encodes titles, positions, and social roles.
What It Does
Identity.Role neurons activate on titles, professional positions, and social roles that define an entity's function or status: 'President', 'CEO', 'professor', 'physician', 'judge', 'parent'. They encode the role itself as an identity type, distinct from the person occupying it. 'The President' activates Role neurons; 'Barack Obama' activates Person neurons; 'Barack Obama, the President' activates both.
How It Behaves
Despite being the smallest Identity sub-type by count, Role neurons show a striking concentration in the middle layers, where the role is being linked to its occupant through coreference and contextual integration. Their small size but distinctive behavior makes them disproportionately important for reasoning tasks that involve authority, responsibility, or institutional relationships — domains where hallucination about who holds what role is particularly consequential.
Research Example
In Mistral 7B, Identity.Role neurons activate on 'the judge ruled' and 'the doctor recommended' even before the specific ruling or recommendation is stated — the role establishes an authority frame that conditions how the subsequent content is interpreted. Errors in Role neuron firing (confusing 'lawyer' and 'judge', for example) produce characteristic hallucinations where institutional authority is misattributed.