24 September 2025: Pathways of Social Inference

Gaurav Patel
Department of Psychiatry
Columbia University

Associate Professor
Co-director, C3N Center

Making inferences about people’s thoughts and feelings requires the real-time integration of complex dynamic sensory information with ongoing theory-of-mind (ToM) operations.  The temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and superior temporal sulcus (STS) contain areas relevant to face-emotion recognition, processing of speech, visual attention, and ToM. Using naturalistic movie and story fMRI paradigms, I will detail how these areas form the basis of three TPJ-STS social inference pathways, relate them to distinct functions, and show how they are disrupted in schizophrenia (Sz), which is associated with poor social functioning.

View a recording of this session here.