Steve Chang

Steve Chang

Yale University

Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms of Social Decision-Making

Room 636 NYU Meyer Hall, 4 Washington Place

Abstract

A defining feature of the primate brain is its social acumen. Humans and other highly social species continuously navigate diverse social contexts and make decisions shaped by prosocial, antisocial, or other strategic preferences. This talk will give an overview of ongoing work on the behavioral and neural mechanisms of social decision-making and social interaction in nonhuman primates. Focusing on the prefrontal–amygdala circuits, it examines the neural codes representing decision variables for self and other, the interactive gaze variables guiding dynamic social attention, and the inter-areal coordination supporting prosocial preference. In the context of naturalistic, continuous interactions, the talk examines how animals deploy flexible social strategies and how the prefrontal cortex integrates social evidence from partners to support mutually cooperative behavior. Together, these studies help elucidate the neural substrates of social decision-making and interaction, offering insight into the evolutionary roots of human social cognition

Speaker Bio

Steve Chang is a Professor of Psychology and of Neuroscience at Yale University, and a member of the Wu Tsai Institute and the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience. He serves as co-Director of Yale’s Interdepartmental Neuroscience PhD Program and co-Director of the undergraduate major in Neuroscience. His research program aims to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying social behavior and to reveal insights into how these processes may go awry in disorders marked by social dysfunction. His laboratory employs high-density electrophysiological recordings across multiple brain regions during real-life social interactions to reveal the neural codes, computations, and network-level dynamics that support naturalistic social behavior and cognition.