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The research was done in the laboratories of Ralph Adolphs, Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and professor of biology, and collaborator Ueli Rutishauser (PhD '08) of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and a visiting associate in biology and biological engineering at Caltech. It appears in the April 21 issue of  Nature Communications . "We have long known that the amygdala is important in processing emotion from faces," says Adolphs. "But now we are starting to understand that it incorporates a lot of complex information to make fairly sophisticated decisions that culminate in our judgments." When looking at a face, brain cells in the amygdala fire electrical impulses or "spikes" in response. However, the role of such face cells in social cognition remains unclear. Adolphs and his group measured the activity of these cells, or neurons, in patients while they were shown images of faces expressing different degrees of happiness ...

The investigators saw the migrating nerve cells, or neurons, hook up with other neurons in the target region to form functioning circuits characteristic of the cerebral cortex. These observations showcase neuroscientists ' newfound ability to monitor, assemble and manipulate so-called neural spheroids, generated from human induced pluripotent stem cells, to study the normal development of the human forebrain during late pregnancy. "We've never been able to recapitulate these human-brain developmental events in a dish before," said the study's senior author, Sergiu Pasca, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. "The process happens in the second half of pregnancy, so viewing it live is challenging. Our method lets us see the entire movie, not just snapshots." The findings, and the techniques used to obtain them, carry potential for the personalized study of individuals' psychiatric disorders. In the study, to be publishe...