Rebecca Saxe - Principal Investigator

C.V.:

Liane Young - Post Doc

Moral Judgment & Theory of Mind

I study the neural basis of human moral judgment. I am primarily interested in the extent to which emotional processes inform moral judgment and the precise role of Theory of Mind, the capacity for mental state representation, in moral judgment. Are brain regions that support Theory of Mind recruited for moral judgment, specifically, judgment of intentional and unintentional harmful, helpful, and neutral actions? If so, what do their functional profiles reveal about belief attribution during moral judgment? What are the component processes of belief attribution for moral judgment, and does spontaneous belief attribution occur in certain moral contexts? To address questions like these, I use methods of cognitive neuroscience: functional neuroimaging (fMRI), studying patient populations with selective cognitive deficits, and modulating activity in specific brain areas using trancranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).

Marina Bedny - Post Doc

The effect of experience on Theory of Mind &
The relationship between sensory and conceptual representations

I am interested in how conceptual knowledge is organized in the brain and how lifetime experiences shape conceptual representations. How does the sensory modality through which we learn information effect how that information is represented in the cortex? How do the intrinsic computational properties of a brain region interact with input from the environment to shape a region's function? To answer these questions I conduct fMRI and TMS studies with sighted and blind participants. In one line of research we examine the effects of early sensory experience on the organization of the neural network that supports reasoning about beliefs (ToM). In a second line of research we examine the relationship between the representations of word-meaning and sensory experiences.

Evelina Fedorenko - Post Doc

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

My general research interests concern the extent of domain-specificity in the mind and brain with regard to language and other cognitive systems. In the Saxelab I am investigating the relationship between linguistic processing and Theory of Mind, the two domains that are intimately interconnected. I am interested in understanding the precise nature of this relationship, including but not limited to the following questions: Is language critical for understanding other people's minds? Do language and Theory of Mind develop in parallel? Are linguistic abilities of populations suffering from disorders of social cognition different from those of neurologically-intact populations, and if so, how?

Emile Bruneau - Post Doc

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.

Mike Frank - Graduate Student

Social cues for word learning

In order to communicate successfully, children acquiring a language have to learn to segment words from continuous speech, learn the meanings of those words, and figure out how to put them together to make coherent sentences. I'm interested in all three of these problems, and I study them using artificial language learning experiments with adults and infants, probabilistic models, and most recently, neuroimaging methods.

Todd Thompson - Graduate Student

The effect of training on Executive Function

It's long been known that the prefrontal cortex supports some of the most abstract and socially necessary cognitive processes. Selective attention, inhibitory control, working memory, planning -- all are tools required to fit into a modern social structure, whether by allowing you to attend to the single relevant thread of conversation in the midst of a party, stop yourself from blurting out a juicy secret, or organize your day to arrive at classes on time. What remains unknown, however, is how those processes relate to each other. Are selective attention and inhibitory control separate functions, or are both facets of a single, central, capacity? I hope to use training to bolster some aspects of executive function, then to observe which other sub-processes of executive function show a transferred benefit. This process should help illuminate the true structure of "executive function", as well as provide a translational tool to boost some cognitive skills needed by socially disadvantaged populations.

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.

David Dodell-Feder - Lab Manager

The Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Theory of Mind

Alek Chakroff - Technical Assistant

C.V.:

The freudian image of the iceberg has never left me. I am thrilled and terrified to think that the vast majority of 'me' is beneath the horizon of consciousness. I have been trying to chip away at the ice, which lately has meant studying the automaticity of social cognition. This began as a desire to conceptually simplify social cognition, which seems immensely complex. I still have this desire - to discover that moral judgments or prejudices begin as crude emotional intuitions, that we read every book by its cover. However, the deeper I dive, the more complex it seems. This is epitomized by two separate findings - one, that we automatically express emotions through 'micro expressions' that are imperceptible to untrained observers. two, that subliminally-presented faces can effect limbic and higher-order brain function - and attitudes. I believe this is an example of a largely non-conscious social communication system, perhaps one of many. We'll see how i tie this in with ToM, though i don't think it will be too difficult.

Jon Scholz - Graduate Student, Georgia Tech

Intelligence- knowlege representation and reasoning

I'm broadly interested in the suite of abilities that humans define as "intelligent", and how an intelligent system is designed. What attracted me to this lab was the opportunity to examine how Theory of Mind, one such example of human high-order cognition, is represented in the brain using fMRI. Over my time here the question has reduced to a computational one: How is knowledge stored in such a manner that it's available when relevent and invisible when it's not? Perhaps more importantly, how is knowledge represented such that inference about novel stimuli can draw upon relevent experience? How would you even compute "relevance"? Because I'm not committed to a biological description of these phenomena, and because I think computer programming is loads of fun, I'm currently applying to computer science programs in the hopes of applying my long-standing interest in design to the problem of intelligence.

Dorit Kliemann

Inferring mental states to justify blame

I am generally fascinated by the mysterious brain, its anatomy and the related functions. Specifically, I am interested in social cognition in general, Theory of Mind and Morality: To which extend do factors (e.g. emotions, intentions, causalities) contribute to our view of what is right and wrong? How are Theory of Mind and Morality related to each other and how do they interact in everyday life? My project in saxelab aimed to examine the cognitive and neural consequences of prior personal experience during moral reasoning. We hypothesized that prior personal experience would modulate the utilization of mental state information in moral reasoning.

Andrea Quintero

Modality and item independence of Theory of Mind activity in fMRI

Jess Andrews - Graduate Student

Theory of Mind and Episodic Memory Retrieval

My general research efforts have been directed at understanding the types of cognitive operations that humans engage in when otherwise not focused on the external world and the brain systems that support these operations. My specific research efforts in the Saxelab involve assessing the anatomical and functional overlap, or lack thereof, of two such cognitive operations: episodic memory retrieval and Theory of Mind. By manipulating the type of mnemonic and Theory of Mind-related information associated with our stimuli, we are able to determine that these two systems, although normally juxtaposed, can interact in adaptive ways during decision-making.