At the center for developmental social neuroscience, headed by prof. Ruth Feldman here at the IDC, we’re working on getting a better understanding of the neural basis of human social behavior and how it is learned and develop across life.
Currently, we’re working on understanding the neural correlates of human social synchrony.
While the phenomenon of social synchrony is well known in animals and humans, the neural 'encoding' or correlates of it in the brain are still unknown. Social synchrony was shown to correlate with neural activity of different brain regions and diversity of neural patterns.
In this project, we will focus on perceiving social synchrony, and will examine the naive rating of low level and high level behavioral socio-affective features, while participants are watching cinema movies from different genres. The ratings will be compared to those of expert raters. Later on, this data will be used to predict the neural activation patterns of participants watching the movies while fMRI scanned.
We propose several sub projects for this study:
a. Building and improving a current python based tool to collect the ratings while watching the movies. Preferably web-based.
b. Building an online visualization tool for the behavioral ratings and video stream
c. Implementing the fMRI analysis pipeline (python based – using Nipype) and visualization of the results.
Students are expected to invest ~100-150 hours, during a single semester, for course credit (3 points).
We are looking for students who are interested in brain science and the neurobiology of human behavior, team-players with strong self-initiation and problem solving approach.
For excellent and curious students, there is an option to continue to MSc combining CS and neuroscience.
Interested? Send you CV and few words describing why you find this project interesting to Adi Ulmer Yaniv, adi.yaniv@gmail.com . please write “CS student for sync project” at the title.