A Flock of Brains: Round-Robin Designs in the Neural Basis of Interpersonal Perception
Speaker
Dr. Robert ChavezInfo
In the past 20 years, there has been a surge of interest in using neuroimaging to study the biological basis of self and person knowledge. However, typical neuroimaging studies on these topics employ designs in which subjects have to think about a target that is familiar to all participants but interpersonally distant (e.g. a fictional person, celebrity, or former president). In other designs, the target is interpersonally close to individual participants but different for each person in the study (e.g. each participant’s best friend or family member). These designs put a limitation on both the generalizability of findings and the kinds of questions you ask with these data. For this talk, I will share the results of a series of recent fMRI studies using “round-robin” designs, in which each participant is both the target stimulus and a perceiver of every other person in the study.
