Research
About the Center
Welcome to the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience (CCSN). Research on cognitive and social neuroscience investigates the neural mechanisms that underlie psychological and social processes. While neuroscientists have long tended to focus on single organisms, organs, cells, or intracellular processes to understand cognition, many social species create emergent structures beyond the individual that guide social and psychological behavior. These emergent structures evolved hand in hand with neural and hormonal mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped animals survive, reproduce, and care for offspring.
Rather than addressing the vast array of questions that fall under the rubric of cognitive and social neuroscience, we focus on neurobiological underpinnings of cognitive and social information processing. Recent work in evolutionary biology and in social neuroscience suggests there may be something special about social cognition. Three distinctions can be drawn: (1) cognitive operations that represent general information processes acting on social stimuli, (2) cognitive operations that evolved from the adaptive value they conferred to social information processing but which have been exapted for general information processes, and (3) cognitive operations that are specific to social stimuli.
A hallmark of cognitive and social neuroscience is the use of multiple methods that bridge disciplines and levels of analysis. CCSN was founded on the premise that promoting interdisciplinary research that cuts across economic, social, behavioral, psychological, neural, physiological, cellular molecular, and genetic levels of analysis can lead to new research advances and change how fields think about the brain and mind. Accordingly, the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience Seminar Series draws upon research using multiple methods, including behavioral studies, functional brain imaging techniques, brain lesion patients, comparative analyses, and historical data.
Center faculty are organized into seven “Research Initiatives,” which serve to maintain contact between scholars with related projects and to encourage new research.
History of the Center
The University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience (CCSN), the first such interdisciplinary Center, was established in 2004. Center members are about equally distributed across the Social Sciences Division and the Biological Sciences Division. New initiatives and advances in problem areas often come from interdisciplinary approaches. The particular mix of training faculty in CCSN represents a blend of science and theory that is well grounded in the past and embraces the technology and methods of the future. Accordingly, they offer a new and powerful mixture of theoretical and analytical tools with which to study complex human behavior. CCSN is committed to promoting rigorous, multi-level integrative research of complex social behavior.
