Browsing by Author "Nurmi, Timo"

Social cognitive neuroscience is a novel and fast-growing field. This field studies the neural basis of social behaviour with the tools of cognitive neuroscience. Most of the research topics in social cognitive neuroscience concern social cognition. Social cognition is defined to be cognitive information processing about conspecifics such as other people. This thesis presents a new tool to localize brain regions related to social cognition in a brain imaging experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Named as Social Localizer, this tool is intended to be a pre-experiment protocol to define so-called regions-of-interest (ROIs) based on a rich set of stimuli presented to the subject during the fMRI scanning. The stimuli were videos, pictures and texts related to social cognition, including biological movement, social interaction, faces, theory-of-mind, body parts and action observation. We ran the Social Localizer with eighteen subjects in order to validate the functionality of the localizer in an fMRI experiment. We also used eye-tracking and keypad response with a one-back-task with the stimuli to make sure that subjects were attending to the stimuli. Overall, the results were promising – we succeeded in localizing many areas central to social cognition. However, the amount of data was not enough for the localizer to specify all ROIs in the individual level. Therefore we decided to combine activations from pairs of stimulus-classes to achieve more consistent results across the group of subjects. In addition, we analyzed the empirical group-level results. These group-level results revealed interesting research questions regarding social cognition that deserve further studying in order to be clarified. In conclusion the Social Localizer provides a promissing tool to define multiple regions-of-interest on social-cognitive criteria. In future studies of social cognition, this tool could be combined with other experimental manipulations to address novel questions in well-defined regions-of-interest.