Prof. Joy Hirsch
Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry, Comparative Medicine, and Neuroscience at Yale University, USA Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at UCL, UK

Talk Title:  Applications of Oxygen Transport to Brain Tissue to Understand Human Social Interactions in the Natural Everyday World

Joy Hirsch is the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry, Comparative Medicine, and Neuroscience at Yale University, USA, and also Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at UCL, UK.  The overarching goal of her research is to understand the fundamental neural mechanisms that underlie live interactive social behaviors between humans. Her laboratory employs functional near infrared spectroscopy, fNIRS, an imaging technology that depends upon oxygen transport to brain tissues as a proxy for neural activity, to investigate the neural underpinnings of live and interactive social behaviors.

Her research team has developed variations on this technology to focus on pairs of individuals (dyads) as fundamental units of behavior rather than the conventional single individual.   Simultaneous measures on two participants engaged in interactive behaviors such as live face-to-face and dialogue between humans are applied to identify the neural systems in the brain that support natural social interactions. Converging evidence based on levels of blood oxygen recruited to active neural tissue from dyads during live face gaze, eye-contact, pupillometry, electroencephalography (EEG), and behavioral reports of subjective effects builds a new “neuroscience of two” in the natural “everyday” world.