Home Department: Sociology
Mentor: Josef Parvizi (Neurology & Neurological Sciences)

“Neural Mechanisms of Social Attribution from Faces”

This project aims to identify the neural mechanisms underlying the social attributions people draw upon perceiving faces. Initially, Kristie will design concise and explicit cues for both extremes of each social trait dimension: warm, competent, feminine, youthful, trustworthy, dominant, and attractive. Data will be collected using a combination of fast temporal resolution single-neuron and intercranial Electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings, electrical stimulation, and pre-surgical resting-state and localizer functional (f) MRI in the same patients. She will be working specifically on the Social Context Task where patients are first provided with a “social context” cue according to the seven social trait dimensions. Her primary tasks will be to write and record these cues, assist in working with patients to collect the iEEG and fMRI recordings, and analyze the data using MATLAB. She will work to identify and analyze the differential neurological responses with and without social contextual manipulations to pinpoint a neural account of social attributions from faces and contextualizing these results with what explicit and implicit biases may influence patients' neural activity.