Saturday, March 2, 2013
10:00 am
Uri Hasson, Ph.D.
Princeton University

will speak on

Face to Face, Brain to Brain: Exploring the Mechanisms of Dyadic Social Interactions

Cognition materializes in an interpersonal space. The emergence of complex behaviors requires the coordination of actions among individuals according to a shared set of rules. Despite the central role of other individuals in shaping our minds, experiments typically isolate human or animal subjects from their natural environment by placing them in a sealed quiet room where interactions occur solely with a computer screen. In everyday life, however, we spend most of our time interacting with other individuals. In the talk Dr. Hasson will argue in favor of a shift from a single-brain to a multi-brain frame of reference and will present a new analysis tool, in which one computes the “functional connectivity” between the brain responses in a seed area in one subject and the responses in other subjects’ brains.

Discussant: Maggie Zellner, Ph.D.