Biological substrates of social cognition in adolescence

处理我们在社交场合的所见所闻，对于我们发展和形成持久的关系，以及参与和在我们的社区中发挥作用的能力至关重要，这是一种独特的人类能力。拥有良好的社交技能在青少年时期尤为重要，因为这是一个年轻人花越来越多的时间与朋友和同学在一起的时期。了解青少年如何与他人互动的一种方法是研究当他们在社交环境中分析视觉信息时，大脑和身体的哪些功能参与其中。在这个研究项目中，我们将首先检查大脑的哪些部分参与了对我们的社交能力有贡献的心理任务，例如当我们必须解释不清楚的陈述时。我们将邀请年龄在12到18岁之间的青少年参加一个项目，在这个项目中，我们使用大脑扫描仪来记录他们的大脑活动，使用一种安全的、非侵入性的技术。这些实验将为我们提供一些关于处理社会信息时最常涉及的大脑区域的线索。为了证实这些观察结果，我们还将研究当大脑的某个特定部分受损时会发生什么，以及大脑某些区域的紊乱如何影响我们分析社交线索的方式。在这一部分的项目中，我们会让有过某种类型脑损伤的青少年完成一些任务和问卷。了解人们如何分析他们的社会环境的另一种方法是了解他们在与其他人互动时将目光投向何处。在第三个项目中，我们将使用一种叫做“眼动仪”的设备来测量青少年在社交场合中眼睛的运动和模式。我们记录的信息将帮助我们更多地了解某些眼动模式是否与青少年更好的社交技能有关。总之，这些研究将帮助我们理解大脑的机制是如何使我们与他人适当互动的。

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.