Brain systems of social perception and cognition
Gregory McCarthy's research program is concerned with the functional organization of the human brain, seeking to characterize functional brain processes and to determine how these processes are evident in psychological phenomena. A current and enduring theme of his research is social perception and cognition. Of particular interest is the manner in which information about the superficial 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, an area generally associated with the perception of visual categories, including faces and bodies, and 2) lateral occipitotemporal cortex, an area associated with biological motion. Another research theme is the neuroscience of executive processing and working memory. Interests also include how task-irrelevant stressors influence functional connectivity between the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex when subjects are engaged in demanding primary tasks such as working memory or maze finding. Methods include neuroimaging, EEG from scalp recordings in healthy volunteers, intracranial EEG recording and direct cortical stimulation in patients, eye tracking, and behavioral measures.
Methods
Topics
Biography
McCarthy received a PhD in Biological Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has held faculty appointments in the Departments of Neurosurgery and Neurology at Yale University, and the Departments of Radiology, Neurobiology, and Psychology at Duke University. He is presently the Henry Ford II Professor of Psychology at Yale.