Arvid Guterstam

I am the Principal Investigator of the Social Perception Lab (socialperceptionlab.com) at the Division of Psychology, Department of Clinical Neuroscience. The overarching goal of our research is to understand how our brains shape the perception of other social agents. We are particularly interested how low-level sensory mechanisms may be used to construct higher social models in the brain, and how these processes contribute to theory-of-mind ability and affects behaviour.

Watch a short film about our ongoing research projects here (filmed April, 2025, Swedish audio with English subtitles).

I completed my MD in 2011 and my PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2016, both at Karolinska Institutet. I spent 4 years as a Wenner-Gren postdoctoral fellow in Michael Graziano's lab at the Department of Psychology, Princeton University, before joining Karolinska Institutet as an Assistant Professor in 2022.

The Social Perception Lab is funded by Swedish Research Council Starting Grant (2022), the Wenner-Gren Foundations, the Karolinska Institutet StratNeuro grant (2022), the Swedish Society for Medicine (2022), the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research "Future Research Leader" grant (2023), the Karolinska Institutet Assistant Professor grant (2023), the Swedish Brain Foundation (2024), the Swedish Society for Medical Research (SSMF) Starting grant (2025), the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg (MAW) Foundations grant (2025), and the European Research Council Starting Grant (2026).