OUR LAB AIMS TO UNDERSTAND HOW
abstract thinking in humans
IS SUPPORTED BY COLLECTIONS OF INTERACTING NEURONS IN THE BRAIN.
How do we understand other people?
As we engage with others, we rapidly interpret their actions and statements in terms of underlying causes: inner mental states such as beliefs, intentions, and emotions. We don’t have direct access to others’ mental states, but instead infer them using a combination of observed actions and prior knowledge. This process of social reasoning draws upon a wealth of information stored in long-term memory, including what we know about the person – their personality, how they tend to act, what they’ve experienced – as well as our general knowledge about the world. Social inferences form an impressive component of the human cognitive repertoire, setting us apart from other animals, and eluding our most advanced artificial intelligence systems. What systems in the mind and brain support social understanding?
How does social cognition emerge in development?
Research on infancy has found that within the first year of life, infants understand other people as beings driven by internal mental states, and use different principles to predict the behavior of people versus inanimate physical objects. Is this understanding built upon innate knowledge about the causal structure of the world? Alternatively, does it develop gradually, requiring experience with other people? What brain systems support this impressive understanding, and how early do they begin to function?
Our lab aims to conduct creative and rigorous science in a supportive atmosphere.
We consider creativity the cornerstone of scientific progress and encourage playful thinking that critically examines theoretical assumptions. We value hard work and believe that this is better achieved through efficient habits rather than long hours. We understand science as a fundamentally social process and aim to foster a community of scholars that enjoy interacting both in the lab and outside of it. We feel that research benefits from a diversity of perspectives and aim to provide a space where everyone feels comfortable regardless of background.
We address these questions using cognitive neuroscience methods, including behavior and neuroimaging.
Our work uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), enabling us to peer inside the human brain and ask which regions are active during specific behaviors and how regions encode information. While traditional fMRI relies on combining data across multiple individuals, we take a different approach by characterizing the precise functional organization of individual human brains. Because neural organization varies across people, this approach avoids the blurring caused by averaging different brains. We also use specialized methods for scanning awake infants to study the development of neural systems supporting social cognition.