Advanced neuroimaging studies of brain networks involved in social cognition

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Understanding others is essential to deal with growing societal challenges and cross-cultural conflicts. Recent findings in social neuroscience converge on at least two separate routes underlying these skills: an affective-motivational route encompassing social emotions, such as empathy, and a socio-cognitive route that enables understanding others' believes and intentions (“mentalizing”). Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have supported this dichotomy, and revealed two largely non-overlapping brain networks underlying each of these faculties. Empathy often involves limbic/paralimbic areas, such as anterior insula and anterior midcingulate cortex, while mentalizing frequently engages a neocortical assembly, with medial prefrontal and temporo-parietal cortices at its core. ******The overall goal of this program is to assemble a team of trainees and researchers to study the anatomical organization of the different regions that collectively make up the “social brain”. Our approach combines multimodal imaging, behavioral assessments of cognition and affect, as well as multivariate statistics and network analyses. We will derive a novel parcellation of social cognition regions, by integrating high-resolution MRI markers of brain anatomy and wiring in single individuals. We will cross-validate our approach using functional MRI tasks and large-scale meta-analysis in the domain of empathy and mentalizing. We will then generate whole-brain network descriptions, which will be analyzed using graph theory methods and simulations to quantify inter-regional segregation and communication. Last, we will evaluate whether our approach can inform routines predicting individual differences in social cognitive ability.******This multidisciplinary program will provide excellent training opportunities and will advance our understanding of the neuroanatomical basis of social cognition. The proposed research will lead to the development of an integrated neuroimaging and behavioural testing platform, which can ultimately be used to improve diagnostic procedures and to guide intervention studies in clinical, educational, and corporate settings.