Research Statement
My laboratory investigates the neural and psychological basis of social behavior in humans. Much of our work has focused on how we recognize emotions from people's facial expressions and from other visual cues.
We study healthy individuals, using functional magnetic resonance imaging and other techniques, and also study neurological patients with focal brain damage, psychiatric populations such as autism, and neurosurgical patients who have electrodes implanted in their brains.
The findings are providing us with a picture of how perception of other people is linked to the recognition of socially relevant cues, to the direction of attention to such cues, to their encoding into memory, and, ultimately, to the guidance of our behavior towards others. These data are important not only for a better understanding of how healthy brains function (e.g., when making economic decisions), but also how ill brains dysfunction (e.g., in autism and post-traumatic stress disorder).
Last updated: March 11, 2009 14:05
