Dr. Gregory Mccarthy

Biography

Gregory McCarthy is the Henry Ford II Professor at Yale University in the Department of Psychology. He earned his Ph.D. in 1980 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research program is focused on understanding the functional organization of the human brain, particularly in relation to psychological phenomena. McCarthy's interests include identifying and characterizing functional brain processes and their anatomical substrates, especially how they change in pathological states. A central theme of his research is social perception and cognition, with specific attention on how surface features of animate entities, such as faces and bodies, along with motion trajectories, inform our inferences about the goals and intentions of social agents. His work has notably examined brain regions, including the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, linked to visual category perception, especially concerning faces and bodies, and the lateral occipitotemporal cortex, associated with biological motion. Additionally, he investigates the influence of task-irrelevant stressors on functional connectivity in the amygdala and prefrontal regions during working memory tasks. His experimental methods encompass a range of techniques, from neuroimaging, including functional and structural MRI and diffusion tensor imaging, to EEG and eye tracking in healthy volunteers and patients undergoing intracranial EEG monitoring for direct cortical stimulation.

Research Interests