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Martin M. Monti
University of California, Los Angeles http://montilab.psych.ucla.edu What does your research focus on? My research focuses on two questions confronting the most characterizing aspects of the human mind: 1) “What is the relationship between language and thought?” and 2) “How and why is consciousness lost and (sometimes) recovered after severe brain injury?” With respect to the first question, I focus on high-level cognition, including arithmetic and music cognition, and logic inference. Does the structure of natural language provide a scaffolding upon which we developed structure-dependent thought in other domains of cognition?
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Piercarlo Valdesolo
Claremont McKenna College cmcmeatlab.com What does your research focus on? I study the influence of discrete emotions on social and moral judgment, with a particular interest in the adaptive importance of these states. Usually this involves constructing realistic social situations in the lab meant to elicit a particular emotional state from participants, and then measuring its effects on phenomena such as trust, cooperation, altruism, blame, or punishment. What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you? I fell into this topic serendipitously.
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Benjamin Storm
University of California, Santa Cruz http://people.ucsc.edu/~bcstorm/research.html What does your research focus on? My research focuses broadly on human memory with a special focus on the causes and consequences of forgetting. Although forgetting may seem like a failure of memory, in many instances it is essential for the efficient and adaptive functioning of memory. Some of my research has shown that forgetting is critical for resolving competition during retrieval, overcoming fixation in creative problem solving, updating autobiographical memory, and facilitating new learning. What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you?
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R. Nathan Spreng
Cornell University http://lbc.human.cornell.edu/ What does your research focus on? My research examines large-scale brain network dynamics and their role in cognition. I am actively involved in the development and implementation of multivariate and network-based statistical approaches to assess brain activity. In doing so, I hope to better understand the properties of the brain networks underlying complex cognitive processes as they change across the lifespan. Currently, I am investigating the link between autobiography and imagination, how we conceive of the future, and successful navigation of the social world.
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Leah Somerville
Harvard University http://andl.wjh.harvard.edu What does your research focus on? My research focuses on the study of human emotion, especially factors that explain variability in emotional responding across people, in social and nonsocial contexts, and across the developmental course. In the last few years, I’ve focused on asking how brain development during the second decade of life relates to common changes in emotional processes and social cognition in adolescents. To inform these issues, my work combines behavioral, psychophysiological and brain imaging approaches. What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you?
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Christopher Olivola
Carnegie Mellon University https://sites.google.com/site/chrisolivola/ What does your research focus on? I am generally interested in (human) judgment and decision making. If I had to narrow it down a bit further, I would say I am particularly interested in understanding (e)valuation: How (and why) do we assign value to things? I’ve tried to tackle this question in several ways; for example, by identifying normatively puzzling patterns of valuation, by designing new value-elicitation methods, and by contributing to the ongoing development and testing of a new decision-making theory (Decision by Sampling). What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you?
