WIP Special

"A Love without Labels: Tracking the emergence of neural codes for close-relationship preferences when viewing psychologically rich social interactions” 

Presented by Fabian Grabenhorst 

Abstract: Social neuroscience has identified brain areas and neural signals underlying different aspects of social cognition. Yet, the field lacks a paradigm to study the human-typical psychological depth and complexity of close relationships. We will present a study plan to image the same participants repeatedly over multiple sessions when they view a psychologically complex web series involving dynamic developments of characters and relationships. Our aim is to localise neural representations for specific characters and relationships, track how the structure of these representations evolves with participants' viewing experience, and determine the validity of these neural representations for predicting participants' social preferences.

Neural correlates of mental state inference

Presented by Ali Mahmoodi  

Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to infer others’ mental states, such as their intentions and beliefs. This differs from the related but distinct task of predicting others’ actions, which often follows from having already inferred their mental states. Despite extensive research on ToM, a comprehensive computational account and a detailed understanding of the underlying neural mechanisms remain largely unknown. To address this gap, we have developed a novel experiment in which human participants are asked to infer others' mental states in some conditions, and to predict others' actions in others—without necessarily engaging in mental state inference. By drawing parallels between ToM and latent state inference, this project aims to formulate a computational framework for ToM and identify the neural substrates that support these computations.