Date: Friday, December 2, 2016
Time: 12:00 pm-1:00 pm
Speaker: Rebecca Saxe, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Professor of Cognitive Science, Martinos Imaging Center, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Talk Title: Social information processing in the brains of people with ASD: two wrong hypotheses, and the road ahead.
Abstract: In this talk I will describe my first two hypotheses about the neural basis of social deficits in ASD. Hypothesis 1: individuals with ASD rely on compensatory mechanisms to answer social questions that other people solve “naturally”. Hypothesis 2: deficits in social processing are most acute when abstract social information must be extracted from a dynamic variable and naturalistic stimulus.  I will show the experiments we did and the data we collected that disconfirm these hypotheses. Then I will speculate about where we go from here.