A Flock of Brains: Round-Robin Designs in the Study of Self and Social Cognition

However, typical neuroimaging studies on these topics employ designs in which subjects have to think about a target that is familiar to all participants but interpersonally distant (e.g. a fictional person, celebrity, or former president). In other designs, the target is interpersonally close to individual participants but different for each person in the study (e.g. each participant’s best friend or family member). These designs put a limitation on both the generalizability of findings and the kinds of questions you ask with these data. For this talk, I will share the results of a series of recent fMRI studies using “round-robin” designs, in which each participant is both the target stimulus and a perceiver of every other person in the study.

Round-robin designs address limitations of the previous designs and allow for rich data analytic opportunities, especially when combined with advanced neuroimaging methods. These studies offer novel insights on the neural basis of self and interpersonal perception among close-knit groups of people.

This event is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (R15-MH122927).

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About the Speaker

Robert Chavez, PhD

Robert Chavez is a social neuroscientist and Assistant Professor of Psychology and Director of the Computational Social Neuroscience Lab at the University of Oregon. His research uses a combination of multimodal neuroimaging and statistical learning methods to describe how regions of the brain work together to represent information about ourselves, other people, and the ways in which people differ from one another. As such, his work broadly draws on theoretical and methodological approaches from cognitive neuroscience, personality psychology, evolutionary theory, and data science.

For more information, please contact:

Dominic Fareri, PhD
516.877.4824
neuroscience@adelphi.edu