"The Neuroscience of Body, Emotion, and Social Context Interactions in Neuropsychiatry". Lecture by Agustin Ibáñez, National Research Council (CONICET-INECO-FAVALORO), Argentina, and University Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile

For more than half a century, cognitive science and neuroscience have envisioned human beings as radically disembodied entities guided by logical rationality and isolated from culture. However, these disciplines have recently provided novel alternatives proposing that action, body, emotion, and social interaction are characterized by situatedness.

Prof. Ibáñez will present relevant evidence from his laboratory, including behavioral studies of neuropsychiatric disorders, intracranial recordings, electroencephalography and neuroimaging. Convergent data suggest that the clinical and theoretical limitations of classical cognitive measures can be circumvented through ecological and situated tasks tackling body action, emotions, and social cognition in several disorders (frontotemporal degeneration, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s disease, focal lesions, schizophrenia, ADHD, bipolar disorder).

Prof. Ibáñez will propose that these impairments are partially dependent on a broad fronto-insular-temporal network (FITN) responsible for (a) on-the-fly context-based prediction making, (b) coordination of the internal (bodily) and external (task-related) milieus, and (c) consolidation of associations between context and target stimuli. Finally, he will discuss the new challenges of the FITN proposal and he will highlight the need for a situated approach to neuropsychiatric research, which stands in opposition to abstract, universal, and decontextualized perspectives.