Dr. William Hodos NACS Seminar: Dr. Gaurav Patel

Pathways of Social Inference

Making inferences about people’s thoughts and feelings requires the real-time integration of complex dynamic sensory information with ongoing theory-of-mind (ToM) operations.  The temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and superior temporal sulcus (STS) contain areas relevant to face-emotion recognition, processing of speech, visual attention, and ToM. Using naturalistic movie and story fMRI paradigms, I will detail how these areas form the basis of three TPJ-STS social inference pathways, relate them to distinct functions, and show how they are disrupted in schizophrenia (Sz), which is associated with poor social functioning.

Dr. Gaurav Patel is an Associate Professor at Columbia University.

Dr. William Hodos NACS Seminars are free and open to the public.