Biological substrates of social cognition in adolescence

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Processing what we see and hear in social situations is critical to our capacity to develop and form lasting relationships and to participate and function within our community, and is a uniquely human ability. Having good social skills is especially important during the teenage years because this is a time when young people spend more and more time with their friends and classmates. One way to learn more about how teenagers interact with others is to study what functions of the human brain and body are involved when they analyse visual information in a social setting. In this research program we will first examine what parts of the brain are involved in mental tasks that contribute to our social abilities, for example when we must interpret statements that are not clear. Teenagers between the ages of 12 and 18 years will be invited to participate in a project in which we use a brain scanner to record the activity in their brain using a safe, non-invasive technique. These experiments will give us some clues regarding the brain regions most often involved when we process social information. To confirm these observations, we will also look at what happens when a particular part of the brain is damaged and how disturbances in certain brain regions affect how we analyse social cues. For this part of the project, we will ask teenagers who have had certain types of brain damage to complete some tasks and questionnaires. Another way to learn more about how people analyse their social environment is to know where they direct their eyes while they interact with other people. In a third set of projects we will use a device called an 'eye tracker' to measure the movements and patterns teenagers make with their eyes while they are involved in a social situation. The information we record will help us to know more about whether some eye movement patterns are associated with better social skills in teenagers. Together, these studies will help us to understand how the mechanics of the brain enable us to interact with others appropriately.