Culturally Informed Social Neuroscience

The seminar was entitled “Towards a Culturally Informed Social Neuroscience: How Computer Science can Help Untangle Relationships Between Culture, Brain and Health” and was given by Dr. Elizabeth Losin. Dr Losin, is a faculty member in the psychology department and the director of the social and cultural neuroscience lab at UM. The purpose of the seminar was to illustrate the importance of computational methods in the sociocultural neuroscience field. As Dr. Losin explains, advanced computational methods have been applied several times in her workplace while conducting research, and she has realized that “computation is key to answer questions in her research”. Currently Dr. Losin is doing research on how cultural experience shapes the …show more content…
With this method, a similar brain map is obtained, but now in multi-variate pattern of brain activity. It is no longer concerned with individual cubes of brain activity, but with the relationships between activity in those cubes. Thanks to this, it provides a map that can be tested and applied to different subjects and cross validated. Mediation Analysis is used to get underlying variables under an existing relationship. It looks at every voxel in the brain and asks how it explains the covariance between the two known variables of interest. It produces a brain map, which tells the relationship between the two variables interest. Finally, Meta Analysis takes brain patterns from traditional uni-varied brain mapping analysis, and pairs it with data from other studies that used the same tasks, but in different modalities. When it analyzes the data altogether, it produces a meta-analytic map that allows the user to have more confidence that the resulting map represents the brain mechanism that might play some essential role in the process reacting to the specific …show more content…
Losing has made use of all three techniques while trying to prove her theory. To prove her theory, Dr. Losing explained she will need to answer questions such as how is culture acquired and how does culture shape the brain. One theory is that culture is acquired by imitation but it wasn't stated how do people know who to imitate. Dr. Losing conducted the necessary research integrating brain mapping techniques and proved that people imitate those that are similar to them (genre, race, political party) or from a higher social status. Furthermore, Dr. Losing conducted research integrating brain mapping techniques to prove that the levels of pain reported depended on race (white, hispanic,