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Savio Wong
Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong http://www.ied.edu.hk/ps/view.php?m=646&secid=1701 What does your research focus on? My research focuses on examining body and brain interaction and its role in decision making. My studies integrate psychophysiological measurements with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the cortical modulation of the autonomic nervous system during decision making. Recently, I expanded my research into educational neuroscience. My recent study examines the role of education in shaping the development of the neural substrate that is involved in decision making.
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Essi Viding
University College London, UK www.ucl.ac.uk/psychlangsci/staff/cehp-staff/e_viding What does your research focus on? My research focuses on understanding different developmental pathways to persistent antisocial behavior. I have a particular interest in a subgroup of children who not only have behavioral problems, but also have callous-unemotional traits. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? It is puzzling to meet children with callous-unemotional traits. They seem to lack empathy for others and do not appear to care much about social affiliation. I want to understand what makes them that way and what could be done to help their social integration.
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Lauri Nummenmaa
Aalto University, Finland http://users.utu.fi/latanu What does your research focus on? I study the brain basis of emotions and social cognition. Using the multimodal brain-imaging approach, I aim to understand the neural circuitry that enables us to navigate the social and physical world unharmed. In particular, I am interested in how the brain automatically processes the emotional and social cues conveyed by other people, and how this enables our brains to tune our behavior and mental processes to manage, for example, social interactions. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? I simply stumbled upon brain imaging.
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Maarten Vansteenkiste
Ghent University, Belgium www.vopspsy.ugent.be/en/developmental-psychology/maarten-vansteenkiste.html www.selfdeterminationtheory.org What does your research focus on? I focus on motivational dynamics in my research. I am to understand how different reasons for engaging in an activity and pursuing different goals are related to outcomes, such as performance, persistence, learning, and well-being. Often, it is assumed that better outcomes will follow when people are more strongly motivated to engage in an activity.
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Lars Schwabe
Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany http://www.cog.psy.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/larss.html What does your research focus on? At the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and endocrinology, my research focuses on how stressful experiences influence cognitive processes. In particular, I am interested in how stress and stress hormones shape our memories and how they affect the interactions of multiple, declarative and non-declarative memory systems. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? To use the words of Jane Austen: ‘‘If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory.
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Victoria Southgate
Birkbeck, University of London, UK www.cbcd.bbk.ac.uk/people/scientificstaff/vicky What does your research focus on? I am interested in the cognitive and neural mechanisms that enable young children, from early infancy, to interact with and learn from other people, and how these might differ from other species. We know a great deal about the kind of social abilities that even very young infants possess, but we know much less about the neural mechanisms that underpin these abilities. My current research investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms that enable infants to understand and predict the actions of others.
