place: peter sabroesgade 14A

Foredragsrum 1 (auditorium 1)

entrance from peter sabroesgade, find entrance between two red buildings

look for a sign with the title of the talk on the entrance door

When a father sees a child reach towards a cookie jar, he knows immediately what the child wants.  My research investigates the neural and cognitive systems which underlie the ability to understand other people’s goal directed actions.  This ability is essential to many simple social interactions, such as when the parent takes the cookie from the jar to give to the child.  Goal understanding may also enable more complex social skills such as understanding other people’s desires and beliefs.  I will present recent neuroimaging results demonstrating that the goals and outcomes of other people’s actions are encoded in parietal regions of the brain, while simpler kinematic motion patterns are encoded in visual and inferior frontal regions.  These results can best be understood in terms of an emerging hierarchical model of action understanding, which maps onto the hierarchical brain systems for the control of one’s own complex actions.  Under this framework, understanding action is not just a matter of ‘direct matching’ in a mirror neuron system, but requires a more sophisticated process with many different levels of representation.  Recently, several papers have emerged suggesting that disruption these matching processes in the mirror neuron system could be a cause of autism.  I will present behavioural data demonstrating that children with autism have normal goal understanding abilities, and that a mirror neuron system explanation of social disability in autism is not plausible.  More advanced models of action and goal understanding are required to make sense of social cognition in the typical and the autistic brain.

time: 2 pm

date: november 20th

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