Lina Asperl

How our rich internal experiences, shaped through social interactions, become encoded in neural circuits has long captivated me. As a PhD student in the Social Brain Lab, my research explores how we learn about potential threats by observing the fearful reactions of others. Specifically, we aim to establish a behavioral paradigm to study socially-mediated place avoidance.

To unravel the neural underpinnings of this social learning process, we use computer vision techniques for fine-grained behavioral analysis and computational modeling of decision-making dynamics. To directly probe the neural substrates, we aim to leverage optogenetics, chemogenetics and in vivo electrophysiology to pinpoint the brain-wide circuits and neuronal populations critically involved in encoding and retrieving these socially-acquired threat memories.