Rebecca Saxe - Principal Investigator

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Marina Bedny - Post Doc

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Effects of developmental experience on abstract cognition.

How does developmental experience affect the human mind and brain? What is the role of experience in structuring higher-level cognitive representations? To gain insight into these question, I study the effects of developmental visual experience on cognition. A key approaches of my research is to compare the minds and brains of populations with different developmental experiences: congenitally blind, late blind, and sighted adults. This approach allows me to look at effects of visual experience during development on the state of the brain and mind in adulthood. I am particularly interested in how higher-level cognitive representations such as those of language and social cognition are shaped by visual experience. My most recent work examines the developmental process by working with blind and sighted children.

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.

Rebecca Nappa - Post Doc

I study how extralinguistic information from our visual and social world gets integrated into interpretations of the language we hear, with particular focus on how children's abilities in these domains differ from adults and the role this may play in language learning. I'm particularly interested in how these inputs modulate attention in the listener/learner, and how this influences our ability to align our perspective with a speaker's. For example, if a speaker pointed to an object as he said, "Hand me the blork," a savvy listener/learner will learn the meaning of the word 'blork.' Without this attention-directing gesture, however, there would be no learning, and moreover our speaker is unlikely to get what he wants. This sort of referential and conceptual alignment is fundamental to effective communication between adults and to successful language learning in children. My current research explores the role of such perspective-taking in language comprehension across ages and within an autistic population, where these sorts of attention-directing cues are often significantly impaired.

Mina Cikara - Post Doc

I am interested in how stereotypes and prejudice disrupt the processes that allow people to interact successfully with one another. I use a wide range of tools—standard laboratory experiments, implicit and explicit behavioral measures, fMRI and psychophysiology—to study how misunderstanding, failures of empathy, and dehumanization unfold in the brain. I am equally interested in the behavioral consequences of these processes. My primary line of research examines the conditions under which social groups and individuals are denied social value, agency, and empathy. For example: why is it more acceptable to sacrifice a homeless person as compared to a college student in a moral dilemma? Why do Red Sox baseball fans wear t-shirts that read "My two favorite teams are the Red Sox and whoever is beating the Yankees"? Why is it so difficult for people on two sides of a moral issue to understand one another? I focus specifically on how the emotions elicited by different social groups lead people to devalue, dehumanize, and even harm outgroup members.

Hyowon Gweon - Graduate Student

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.

Zeynep Saygin - Graduate Student

I received my B.S. in neuroscience in 2005 from Brown University, studying visual cognitive neuroscience and oil painting. I am now a second year graduate student at the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT. My interests lie in the development of attentional and emotional regulation, and how they interact with each other. I currently study this in both pediatric and adult clinical populations (Pediatric Bipolar Disorder, Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and Social Anxiety Disorder) and healthy controls using multimodal imaging (functional and structural MRI, MRS, DTI).

Jorie Koster-Hale - Graduate Student

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 - Pediatric fMRI Coordinator

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. As the new Pediatric fMRI Coordinator, I will soon be involved in multiple studies, including a study designed to learn more about autism spectrum disorder.

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?

Hannah Pelton - Undergraduate Researcher

Developmental Theory of Mind

I am interested in the aspects of cognition, such as Theory of Mind, that change from childhood to adulthood. I want to know how children's minds change as they grow, and why we are not born with an adult's mind. My research includes behaviorally studying how children learn from others in a social context. I also am involved in a a behavioral and fMRI experiment of children with autism spectrum disorder.

Swetha Dravida - Undergraduate Researcher

I am interested in the way abstract concepts, such as language, are represented in the brain. Specifically, I am interested in whether or not a link exists between our perception of motion and our understanding of action verbs. Right now, I am working with Marina Bedny on an fMRI study looking at how verbs are represented in the brain. We are examining whether action verbs are related to sensorimotor experiences or represented independently based on abstract concepts, such as events.

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