Rebecca Saxe - Principal Investigator

C.V.:

Emile Bruneau - Post Doc

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Cross-Cultural Social Cognition

How we think about others can depend upon what group they belong to. Group membership, however, is often difficult to define or identify. I am interested in a number of issues surrounding group identity, including how people from different cultural and religious perspectives are able to identify the group membership of others, how the brain responds to people within and outside of our groups, and our capacity to change how we think about other people. For example, how does experience change the way people think and reason about the actions and thoughts of others? And how does the brain differentially classify a person as an individual or a group member? To answer these questions I use functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) techniques.

Hyowon Gweon - Post Doc

Theory of Mind and Causal Learning

I am interested in how social cognition might constrain learning. Much of our causal knowledge is acquired through everyday experience and observation, rather than through explicit instruction. And our understanding about other people's intentions, desires, and beliefs as reasons for actions may be one of the important factors that place weight on certain evidence we get. How exactly does this happen? Does having an explicit understanding of theory of mind change the way children interpret evidence? I am also interested in how 'understanding of abstract causality' and 'interpretation of other people's actions in terms of their beliefs, desires and motivations' might rely on common underlying mechanisms.

Jorie Koster-Hale - Graduate Student

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Language and Theory of Mind

I am interested in the cognitive and neural bases of high level representation, particularly the role that language plays in higher level representation, concept building, and generalization. My focus is on intensional semantics, theory of mind, and the interface between the two. I explore, using behavioral and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) techniques, what it is that allows people to hold abstract and at times inconsistent representations of the world, including other people's beliefs and mental states, future outcomes, and alternative possibilities.

Todd Thompson - Graduate Student

The effect of training on Executive Function

Todd is interested in using a variety of neuroimaging techniques to investigate methods of increasing intelligence.

Ben Deen - Graduate Student

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I'm interested in our ability to infer high-level social information from visual stimuli, such as human motion, facial expression, gaze direction, etc. When we view a human grasp at an object, we rapidly and automatically interpret this action in a mentalistic framework: the person has a desire to have the object, and is therefore retrieving it. More subtly, point-light displays depicting human walking motion can convey complex social properties such as the emotional state of the walker. What sort of computations underlie these abilities, and how are they implemented in the brain? Are similar brain regions involved in the kinematic analysis of human motion, the inference of intentions or goals from motion stimuli, and prediction of future actions based on these goals, or do these processes rely on dissociable substrates? And finally, do these processes need to be explained in terms of simple mental states as opposed to phenomenal states, and if so, do different types of mental states (e.g. intentional, perceptual, emotional) interact to form coherent interpretations at the perceptual level?

Hilary Richardson - Graduate Student

While I was a research assistant at the University of Michigan I became extremely interested in developmental neuroscience and studies surrounding the theory of mind. I am intrigued by the different hypotheses explaining the development of the theory of mind, and am interested in how various life experiences affect this development. I am excited to be a part of the effort to clarify when and how this complex construct forms in the human brain.

Alex Paunov - Graduate Student

My ultimate research interest is in understanding how cognition and communication in human societies give rise to culture (Sperber, 1996). Because culture is the product of interactions between individual minds, a detailed naturalistic theory of culture must be grounded in the mental representations contained in individual minds and the social-cognitive processes that govern change in these representations. Consequently, my more proximate interests are only indirectly related to culture; they are in better characterizing the micro-level mechanisms by which people's minds change in response to socially acquired information, and specifically in explaining how information containing evidence about the mental states of other agents is processed, how the inferred mental states are represented, and how these representations are then used to update one's own mental states. The particular source of evidence about others' minds that I focus on is verbally communicated information, primarily because there are more detailed formal descriptions of language than of complex non-verbal actions, as well as due to the importance of language as a vehicle for cultural change. Methodologically, my aim is to tackle these questions through a combination of sensitive behavioral paradigms and the best available techniques in human cognitive neuroscience. By extension, I am therefore interested in advancing data acquisition and analysis techniques. So, my goal is to first make progress toward a taxonomy of representations of others' mental states and toward a qualitative description of the processes they participate in, informed by observed differences in the neural implementation. This, in turn, should facilitate computational modeling of the structure and dynamics of change of these representations.

Nick Dufour - Lab Manager

After receiving my degree in biotechnology, I decided to pursue a longstanding interest in cognitive neuroscience. I hope to study the precise nature of theory of mind. When we construct representations of each other, are we making abstracted models that can be used to simulate others? Or are we drawing on experience and creating composite models out of behaviors we've already witnessed?

Julianne Herts - Lab Manager / Pediatric fMRI Coordinator

Developmental Theory of Mind

I am interested in how Theory of Mind develops over the lifespan, and how that development influences children's reasoning abilities and social skills. I am particularly interested in the implications this research has for improving education through a greater understanding of cognitive development. I am currently involved in several behavioral and neurological studies examining Theory of Mind in children.

Adele Luta - Technical Assistant

Cross-Cultural Social Cognition

I am currently working on cross cultural social cognition research utilizing both functional neuroimaging (fMRI) techniques and behavioural studies. I am excited to expand our understanding of Theory of Mind in this area. For example, how does experience change the way people think and reason about the actions and in-actions of others? In the future, I hope to combine ToM with what we know about distributed cognition. In particular, how it relates to educational psychology and cognitive science during real time/potentially life critical situations.

Nir Jacoby - Lab Manager (Heir Apparent)

Marina Bedny - Post Doc

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Effects of developmental experience on abstract cognition.

Swetha Dravida - Undergraduate Researcher

Zeynep Saygin - Graduate Student

Attention and Emotional Regulation, Multi-modal imaging

Rebecca Nappa - Post Doc

Language Comprehension in Autism

Mina Cikara - Post Doc

Social Cognition

Hannah Pelton - Undergraduate Researcher

Developmental Theory of Mind

Jacqueline Pigeon - Undergraduate Researcher

Infant Cognition

Liane Young - Post Doc

Moral Judgment & Theory of Mind

James Dungan - Undergraduate Researcher

Human Moral Judgement

Elizabeth Redcay

Developmental cognitive neuroscience of typical and atypical communication

David Dodell-Feder

Theory of Mind in Clinical Populations

Alek Chakroff

C.V.:

Evelina Fedorenko

The effects of prosody on the listener's online representation of the speaker's thoughts

Roy Cohen

Agnieszka Pluta

Mike Frank

Social cues for word learning

Jon Scholz

Intelligence- knowlege representation and reasoning

Dorit Kliemann

Inferring mental states to justify blame

Andrea Quintero

Modality and item independence of Theory of Mind activity in fMRI

Jess Andrews - Graduate Student

Theory of Mind and Episodic Memory Retrieval