Social Perception in Development
We humans are social creatures endowed with perceptual systems that are highly attuned to other people - able to pick up on the subtlest of facial and body expressions. This ability allows us not only to “categorise” people and predict their behaviour, but also to infer how other people are categorising us. How do we accomplish such critical feats, and how does the brain get wired up during development to make them possible? At their core, all of our investigations ask fundamental questions about the “socialness” of humans and our research program focuses on understanding the cognitive and neural architecture of social perception and how it changes over development.
Our current research program addresses three intertwined questions:
1) What is the cognitive and neural architecture of social perception in adults?
2) How does the social perception system arise and change across development?
3) Is social perception different in Autism Spectrum Disorder and, if so, what are the neural underpinnings of these differences?
To address these questions, we use a variety of methods, including behavioral and eye-tracking paradigms, visual psychophysics and both structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in individuals with developmental disorders as well as typical children and adults.
1) What is the cognitive and neural architecture of social perception in adults?
The lab's current work in adults is focused on elucidating the basic cognitive and neural architecture of high-level social perception. The rich characterization of this system will enable us to ask how social perception builds across development. Our long-term research agenda in typical adults involves investigating the role of a specific region of the brain in and around the superior temporal sulcus (STS). This region has previously been implicated in such diverse social functions as face, body, voice and biological motion perception, as well as understanding actions and intentions, and thinking about another person’s thoughts. Despite functional imaging studies of each of these discrete skills, the precise functional organization of this STS region is still unknown. Currently, we are investigating the role of the STS in two areas of social perception where previous research is relatively scarce and the relevance to social abilities in the real world is clear: i) animacy perception and ii) the perception of social interactions.
How is "animacy" coded in the brain?
Is the perception of social interaction a unique cognitive process?
What is the relationship between structural and functional connectivity and the organisation of the social brain?
2) How does the social perception system arise and change across development?
While some key skills in social perception seem to be present from very early in infancy, children are not born with adult-like social skills. How and when does the remarkable human ability to recognise and understand social interactions develop and at what point is it fully mature? When do category selective cortical regions responsive to social objects and situations arise, and how do they change across development? The lab investigates these questions both to resolve outstanding questions in typical development and to provide a baseline against which to compare the development of social perception in neurodevelopmental disorders.
How does social perception change across development?
How do category selective cortical regions in the "social brain" change across development?
3) Is social perception different in Autism Spectrum Disorder and, if so, what are the neural underpinnings of these differences?
For most of us, even complex social tasks feel practically effortless. For autistic individuals, however, understanding of social interactions with or between neurotypical people can feel effortful and confusing. What are the fundamental factors that lead to these differences in social understanding, and what do they reveal about the functional organisation of social cognition in both neurotypical and ASD individuals? Do such differences result from underlying changes in social perception, in more basic perceptual processes, or in how attention is allocated? Might differences between neurodiverse and neurotypical individuals in the timing and types of social cues used to understand social scenes lead to misunderstanding and disconnection? Our research addresses these questions by i) directly investigating social perception abilities and their neural bases in autistic individuals and ii) asking if differences in social abilities might arise from more general perceptual or attentional changes, (i.e., whether ASD and neurotypical people perceive the whole world differently, or mostly just the social world). Specific examples of questions our research is attempting to answer include: