A current and enduring focus of our research is social perception and cognition. Within this theme, we have been particularly interested in the manner in which information about the surface features of animate entities (such as faces and bodies) and information about motion trajectories contribute to inferences about the goals and intentions of social agents. With respect to the brain, these studies have focused on two regions: 1) Ventral occipitotemporal cortex (including the fusiform gyrus), an area generally associated with the perception of visual categories including faces and bodies, and 2) cortex in and around the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), which has been associated with a variety of functions including the perception of biological motion, and the motion of simple shapes that covary in ways that suggest agency. We have shown that both surface features and motion strongly activate both of these regions, and that these regions show a high degree of functional connectivity at rest and during tasks. We are now using dynamic causal modeling and other methods to investigate how information flows between these areas when subjects view motion and faces. Our results suggest that the direction of information flow between these regions is influenced by whether the stimulus is primarily form or motion. We are now investigating the relationship between these two brain regions in contexts where the cues for animacy represented by the stimuli are manipulated experimentally, conveyed to subjects by instruction, or derived from the moment-to-moment relationships among randomly moving dots.
We have several other research projects in the realm of social perception and cognition. One has concerned the degree to which face processing in the brain is influenced by the race or social membership of the perceived face. Recent studies in our lab have suggested that these influences occur far earlier in time than previously thought, and challenge our notions about when and where in the brain specialized face processing begins.
Sample publications
Engell AD, McCarthy G (2010) Selective attention modulates face-specific induced gamma oscillations recorded from ventral occipitotemporal cortex. J Neurosci 30:8780-8786.
Engell AD, McCarthy G (2013) Probabilistic atlases for face and biological motion perception: An analysis of their reliability and overlap. Neuroimage 74C:140-151.
Gao T, Scholl BJ, McCarthy G (2012) Dissociating the detection of intentionality from animacy in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus. J Neurosci 32:14276-14280.
He Y, Johnson MK, Dovidio JF, McCarthy G (2009) The relation between race-related implicit associations and scalp-recorded neural activity evoked by faces from different races. Social Neurosci 4:426-442.
Lee SM, Gao T, McCarthy G (2012) Attributing intentions to random motion engages the posterior superior temporal sulcus. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci.
Shultz S, McCarthy G (2012) Goal-directed actions activate the face-sensitive posterior superior temporal sulcus and fusiform gyrus in the absence of human-like perceptual cues. Cerebral Cortex 22:1098-1106.