Ralph Adolphs: Cal Tech

Like most other social neuroscience groups, my lab has been using pictures of faces as stimuli for a long time– we investigate how people look at them, what social judgments they make about them, and how their brains respond to them. But how ecologically valid is this? Recently, we have begun exploring how we respond to the presence of a real person. These studies reveal profound effects on judgment, behavior and brain activation by a real person, compared to a mere picture (or video) of them. They also point to specific brain structures that mediate these effects (notably the amygdala) and begin to shed further light on disorders of social behavior such as autism.