Topic: Social brain interaction within real-life contexts: No brain is an island
Speaker: Hirofumi Saito Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University
Host: Tao Liu, ZJU100 Young Professor
Time: 10:30-12:00 October 17th, 2017 (Tuesday)
Venue: Room802
Abstract:
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; ….” Suppose the main is the social brain, the words written by the English poet J. Donne (1572-1631) may imply a hint for future trends in neuroimaging. As most social skills, such as learning through imitation, understanding others’ intentions, consist of interpersonal communication, it is difficult to fully understand the neural basis of mental life from a single brain point of view. In this regard, to show the need for simultaneously measuring the interactive activity of two brains within real-life contexts, I will introduce a variety of NIRS experiments including verbal and non-verbal communication conducted in my lab. Finally, I will discuss how face-to-face contexts (e.g., deceiver and lie detector) entrain coupling of neural activity across two brains to demonstrate how NIRS may be used to investigate hyper scanning of dyadic social interaction.
About the Speaker:
Hirofumi Saito has been a Full Professor in psychology of Graduate school of Human Informatics since 1996, Information Science since 2003, and Informatics since 2017, Nagoya University. He obtained Ph.D. of Lit. from Kwansei Gakuin University in 1991, and has held visiting and honorary positions at several universities and academic institutions around the world (a Visiting Prof. at the Max Planck Institute in 1996, and at Univ. of Colorado Boulder from 2000 to 2001). He has been serving as a reviewer for many international journals (e.g., Neuroscience letters, Frontiers, Brain and Cognition) and national/regional funding agencies. His research interests include language processing in Japanese, gesture and speech in bilingualism, and human cognition and action. He has published extensively on these topics in prominent psychology and neuroscience journals.
