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Investigations of the neural basis of 'social vision'

Reference	BB/C502530/1
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Paul Downing
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	Bangor University
Department	Sch of Psychology
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	182,687
Status	Completed
Type	Research Grant
Start date	01/02/2005
End date	30/04/2008
Duration	39 months

Abstract

Cognitive neuroscientists have begun to examine the brain systems that support our perception of other humans ¿ what might be called social vision. Several brain areas have been found to activate when volunteers are presented with photographs or movies of biological stimuli, including the superior temporal sulcus, and an occipitotemporal region we previously identified that responds selectively to images of the human body. However, other work has shown that activation in these general regions is produced by tasks and stimuli (such as moving dots) that are not related to social vision. So the first goal of our work is to use high resolution fMRI to map these brain regions, testing a variety of contrasts (biological and nonbiological) that have been shown to activate them. The second goal is to answer questions about the functional role of regions that respond to images of humans, such as: how views of actions separated by time are integrated; how information about identity and action are combined into a single representation; how social vision areas process information about the objects of others actions; which regions support our ability to track other people across long intervening periods; and how neural activity changes as actions are presented repeatedly and become familiar.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Animal Sciences (AS)
Research Topics	Neuroscience and Behaviour
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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