• DOI:10.1098/rstb.2008.0279
• Corpus ID: 3060394

Asymmetries of the human social brain in the visual, auditory and chemical modalities

@article{Brancucci2008AsymmetriesOT,
  title={Asymmetries of the human social brain in the visual, auditory and chemical modalities},
  author={Alfredo Brancucci and Giuliana Lucci and Andrea Mazzatenta and Luca Tommasi},
  journal={Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences},
  year={2008},
  volume={364},
  pages={895 - 914}
}

• A. Brancucci, G. Lucci, +1 author L. Tommasi
• Published 12 April 2009
• Psychology
• Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Structural and functional asymmetries are present in many regions of the human brain responsible for motor control, sensory and cognitive functions and communication. Here, we focus on hemispheric asymmetries underlying the domain of social perception, broadly conceived as the analysis of information about other individuals based on acoustic, visual and chemical signals. By means of these cues the brain establishes the border between ‘self’ and ‘other’, and interprets the surrounding social world in terms of the physical and behavioural characteristics of conspecifics essential for impression formation and for creating bonds and relationships. We show that, considered from the standpoint of single- and multi-modal sensory analysis, the neural substrates of the perception of voices, faces, gestures, smells and pheromones, as evidenced by modern neuroimaging techniques, are characterized by a general pattern of right-hemispheric functional asymmetry that might benefit from other aspects of hemispheric lateralization rather than constituting a true specialization for social information.