Research
Our faculty study each area from multiple perspectives: from animal models and computational models, to systems and cognitive neuroscience, to behavioral and psychophysiological measurements from individuals or groups. This work involves studying basic processes with translational impact—including affective disorders, such as anxiety and depression; developmental disorders; and ethics and law.
Areas of Expertise
(Affective) learning & memory
We study the basic processes that enable us to learn about our environment and to learn from our mistakes, with implications for everything from student performance to affective disorders.
Cognitive & socioemotional development
We seek to understand what knowledge structures are innate, how learned knowledge is acquired over a lifetime, and how the accumulation of knowledge is affected by developmental disorders or neurological disorders.
Virtue & morality
We examine when and why individuals cooperate with one another or trust one another and investigate how it is that we come to hold moral beliefs and how malleable those beliefs can be.
Faculty Expertise
Please note that many of our faculty are interdisciplinary and listed in more than one area.
Area Contact: Gorica Petrovich—Neurobiology of motivation and feeding behavior; functional organization of the brain systems mediating environmental control of food intake, specifically interactions between the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hypothalamus; modulation of hunger and satiety mechanisms by learning and stress.
John Christianson—The focus of John Christianson's research is to determine how stress interacts with the neural systems that permit individuals to adapt to potentially dangerous and changing environments. The current emphasis is on the neural mechanisms that underly safety learning. The laboratory employs a multidisciplinary approach to study brain circuits and behavior including sophisticated behavioral paradigms, electrophysiology and optogenetics. The overall goal is to provide new insight into the organization of the brain and behavior and improve treatment for psychological illness.
Michael McDannald—Neural circuits in associative learning; neural basis for predicting the presence and absence of aversive events and how adverse experience early in life alter these predictive abilities in adulthood, focusing on interactions between monoaminergic systems, the amygdala and ventral striatum; common neural encoding of the presence of rewards and the absence of aversive events.
Caroline Smith—Dr. Smith's research program is focused on better understanding developmental interactions between the nervous and immune systems. In particular, the lab studies the roles of microglia, the resident immune cells of the brain, and the gut microbiome, in organizing social neural circuits and behavior during development. Her work also examines how maternal exposure to environmental toxicants—such as air pollution—combine with psychosocial factors to influence offspring development.
Area Contact: Scott Slotnick—Cognitive Neuroscience: Neural mechanisms of visual memory; control regions and sensory effects associated with retrieval of visual memories; subjective experience during memory retrieval; cortical substrates associated with visual feature-based perception/attention.
Stefano Anzellotti—Person knowledge and its perceptual foundations (e.g., recognition of identity and facial expressions). Computational models of cognitive and neural mechanisms at the transition from perception to conceptual knowledge, with a focus on how we understand others. Methods used include fMRI, MVPA, MVPD, Bayesian models of behavior, deep networks.
Elizabeth Kensinger—Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience: The effect of emotional content on memory; specifically, the cognitive and neural mechanisms through which emotion influences the vividness and accuracy of memory, and how these influences change across the adult lifespan; research questions are investigated through behavioral testing of young and older adults and functional neuroimaging (fMRI).
Sean MacEvoy—Human visual neuroscience, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and psychophysics; neural mechanisms of form perception and object recognition; perceptual learning; functional organization of the human visual cortex. History of neuroscience.
Maureen Ritchey—Neuroscience of human memory: functional organization of the medial temporal lobes; effects of emotional arousal and other modulatory states on memory processes; memory consolidation; context representation and its influence on memory-guided behavior. Neuroimaging methods including fMRI and EEG: multi-voxel pattern analysis; functional connectivity; time-frequency analyses.
Liane Young—Moral Psychology and Neuroscience. The role of theory of mind in moral judgment. Moral emotions. Cultural and individual differences in moral cognition. Moral judgment versus moral behavior. Motivated moral reasoning. Conceptions of the self and free will. The research employs methods of social psychology and cognitive neuroscience: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), studying patient populations with selective cognitive deficits, and modulating activity in specific brain regions using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
Area Contact: Karen Rosen—Social and emotional development during infancy and early childhood; parent-child attachment relationships; sibling relationships.
Sara Cordes—Infant, child, and adult cognition. Preverbal and verbal representations of number, space, and time. Children's early counting acquisition and understanding of mathematical concepts. Music cognition and perception. Psychophysics of quantity perception. Learning throughout the lifespan. Influences of language and context on learning, discrimination, and decision-making.
Angie Johnston—Angie's work investigates the origins of human teaching and learning by comparing human learning to that of domesticated dogs. To address these questions, she works with children and pet dogs from the local community to pinpoint which aspects of human learning are unique and which are shared. She also works with dingoes in Australia to explore how domestication has shaped these traits.
Katherine McAuliffe—The development and evolution of cooperation. Katherine's primary research investigates how children develop an understanding of the norms governing cooperation and a willingness to enforce them. Her work on children is situated within a broader cross-cultural and comparative context that seeks to understand how and why the cognition supporting cooperation evolved.
Kristina Moore—Education, social and developmental psychology, and sport and exercise science. Kristina's research explores components of achievement motivation and social influence on various psychological, social, and developmental outcomes in athletes, with a focus on positive youth development through sport.
Area Contact: Ehri Ryu—Quantitative Psychology: multilevel modeling; model fit assessment in multilevel structural equation modeling; two approaches to analyzing multivariate multilevel data; longitudinal data analysis.
Stefano Anzellotti—Person knowledge and its perceptual foundations (e.g., recognition of identity and facial expressions). Computational models of cognitive and neural mechanisms at the transition from perception to conceptual knowledge, with a focus on how we understand others. Methods used include fMRI, MVPA, MVPD, Bayesian models of behavior, deep networks.
Brooke Magnus—Measurement of behavioral and health outcomes; item response theory; approaches to modeling zero inflation in survey data; categorical data analysis; psychometrics.
Scott Slotnick—Signal detection theory models of memory. Modeling of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to correct for multiple comparisons.