How the Human Brain Makes Sense of the Social World
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Dr. Meghan Meyer will discuss her research on how our brains help us to learn about and navigate the social world.
Humans are a highly social species. As children, we depend on caretakers for support. As adolescents, we navigate intricate social hierarchies. As adults, we cooperate in complex work environments. To thrive in this social world, all of us need to anticipate people’s reactions and learn about our social networks.
Dr. Meghan Meyer’s program of research integrates social psychology and cognitive neuroscience to understand what drives our inherent tendency, ability, and need to think about the social world around us. Her aim to answer questions such as: How do we juggle multiple social cognitive demands on the fly? How do we learn and consolidate information about the people and groups with whom we interact? And how do we represent the complex social networks we navigate day-to-day?
In this talk, Dr. Meyer will demonstrate how the brain’s default network—an interconnected set of cortical regions—may be designed to help us navigate and learn from our complex social world. In fact, the default network may be so integral to human social behavior that when our social connection goes awry, we see traces of our loneliness in this brain network
This event is part of the Computational and Network Neuroscience series, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (MH122927 to DSF).
For more information, please contact:
Dominic Fareri
neuroscience@adelphi.edu