Faculty Research Interests

COGNITION, BRAIN, AND BEHAVIOR

Bucker, Randy. Randy Buckner’s laboratory explores how brain systems support memory function and how these systems change during both typical aging and aging associated with disease. Two themes run through this work. First, acts of memory are hypothesized to depend on a collection of cobbled-together processes that aid memory decisions. Memory is influenced by the intentions of the subject, emotion, and unconscious processes. Guided by this idea, the Buckner laboratory seeks to characterize brain networks that support distinct components of memory encoding and retrieval and ask how they combine to facilitate memory in all of its forms. Second, multiple, dissociated factors are hypothesized to affect older adults that combine in their influences on memory abilities and cognitive decline. This second theme has led the labora­tory to use molecular, structural, and func­tional imaging methods to characterize distinct age-dependent cascades that influence memory function. Two emerging areas of interest relate to development across the lifespan and indi­vidual differences. The laboratory is also inter­ested in innovating new methods to answer these questions including the development of processing and neuroinformatics tools to facili­tate large-scale data analysis.

Randy Buckner received his BA in Psychology and his PhD in Neurosciences from Washington University in St. Louis. He is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a member of the Center for Brain Science, and faculty of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School.

Recent publications:

Buckner, RL (2004) “Memory and executive function in aging and AD: Multiple factors that cause decline and reserve factors that compensate.” Neuron, 44: 195-208.

Shannon, BJ, and Buckner, RL (2004) “Functional-anatomic correlates of memory retrieval that suggest nontraditional processing roles for multiple distinct regions within posterior parietal cortex.” Journal of Neurosci­ence, 24: 10084-10092.

Buckner, RL, Snyder, AZ, Shannon, BJ, LaRossa, G, Sachs, R, Fotenos, AF, Sheline, YI, Klunk, WE, Mathis, CA, Morris, JC, and Mintun, MA (2005) “Molecular, structural, and functional characterization of Alzheimer’s disease: Evidence for a relationship between default activity, amyloid, and memory.” Journal of Neuroscience, 25: 7709-7717.

Caramazza, Alfonso — Cognitive neuropsy­chology, language, visual perception, and atten­tion. Research in my laboratory has principally focused on problems of lexical processing—to understand the organization and processing structure of the lexical system and the nature of lexical representations. A number of specific issues concerning the structure of lexical forms and their relation to grammatical, morpho­logical, and semantic information are being pursued. These issues are addressed through research with brain-damaged and normal subjects. The analysis of the impaired perfor­mance of brain-damaged subjects provides a window into the organization and structure of normal language processes and their possible neural substrates. Some of the specific issues currently being pursued are: 1) the structure of lexical-orthographic representations; 2) the representation of grammatical class informa­tion; and 3) the representation and processing of morphological structure.

A related set of interests concerns the orga­nization of the naming, reading, and spelling systems as revealed through the analysis of acquired anomia, dyslexia, and dysgraphia. For example, what are the implications of the production of semantic errors in naming, reading, and spelling for the structure of these processes? That is, what can we learn about the structure of semantic representations from the distribution of semantic errors in various word recognition and production tasks? Other issues being pursued in this area include: 1) the organization of lexical and nonlexical processes in pronouncing and spelling words; and 2) the role of the graphemic buffer in reading and spelling.

A more recent interest in my labora­tory concerns a set of problems about visual perception and attention that have arisen from the investigation of patients with visual-spatial neglect and other visual processing neuro­logical disorders. Visual neglect is a disorder in which a patient fails to attend or respond to a spatially specific part of a stimulus. In our earlier research, we have shown that there are several different types of visual-spatial neglect resulting from damage at different levels of visual representation. In our current work we are pursuing several questions: 1) what can we learn about the structure of different levels of representation in object recognition from the performance of neglect and agnosic patients? 2) what is the fate of the neglected part of a representation? and 3) what is the role of attention at different levels of visual represen­tation?

Some recent publications:

Laudanna, A., Badecker, W. & Cara­mazza, A. (1992). Processing inflectional and derivational morphology. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 333-348.

Miceli, G. & Caramazza, A. (1993). The assignment of word stress: Evidence from a case of acquired dyslexia. Cognitive Neuropsy­chology, 10(3), 273-296.

Caramazza, A. (1994). Parallels and diver­gences in the acquisition and dissolution of language. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 346, 121-127.

Cavanagh, Patrick — Research interests include image understanding, attention, visual coding, motion perception, color vision, perceptual invariances, visual memory, neural models of memory, and the effects of brain lesions on vision.

Recent evidence indicates that the visual system separately analyzes several different attributes in the scene, for example, color, movement, depth, texture, and luminance. The results of these analyses are then recom­bined to construct an internal model of the scene. Our research projects attempt to isolate these specialized analyses psychophysically in order to study the coding of information in the visual system and the representation of two- and three-dimensional shape. Tasks involving the inference of 3-D shape from 2-D shape (e.g. the perception of depth from shadows and from line drawings) are then used to study the contribution of the different attri­butes to the reconstruction of the scene.

I am also interested in the physiology underlying these visual codes as well as the processes mediating the interaction of the visual codes with memory, and the role of attention in selecting or creating visual representations.

Our most recent work addresses the role of attention in selecting and creating visual representations.

Some recent publications:

Alvarez, G. A., & Cavanagh, P. (2004) The capacity of visual short-term memory is set both by visual information load and by number of objects. Psychological Science, 15, 106-111.

Cavanagh, P. (2004). Attention routines and the architecture of selection. In Michael Posner (ed.), Cognitive Neuroscience of Atten­tion. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 13-28.

Battelli, L., Martini, P., Barton, J.S.S., & Cavanagh, P. (2003). Bilateral deficits of tran­sient visual attention in right parietal patients. Brain, 126, 2164-2174.

Greene, Joshua — Joshua Greene received his AB in philosophy from Harvard University in 1997 and his PhD in philosophy from Princ­eton University in 2002. From 1999-2006 he has trained as a cognitive neuroscientist in the Department of Psychology at Princ­eton University, joining the department as a postdoctoral fellow in 2002. His primary research interest is the psychological and neuroscientific study of morality, focusing on the interplay between emotional and “cogni­tive” processes in moral decision-making. His broader interests cluster around the intersec­tion of philosophy, psychology, and neurosci­ence. He is currently writing a book about the philosophical implications of our emerging scientific understanding of morality.

Hauser, Marc D. — Marc Hauser’s research sits at the interface between evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience and is aimed at understanding the processes and consequences of cognitive evolution. Observa­tions and experiments focus on nonhuman primates and human infants, incorporating methodological procedures from ethology (acoustic playback experiments), infant cogni­tive development (expectancy violation tech­nique), cognitive neuroscience (hemispheric lateralization tasks) and neurobiology (single­unit recordings). Current foci include: studies of numerical abilities, understanding of beliefs and natural kinds, investigations of signal referentiality, and the neurophysiological processes guiding acoustic perception.

Professor Hauser received a BS from Bucknell University and a PhD from UCLA.

Currently, Hauser is a Harvard College Professor, and Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Program in Neurosciences. He is the co-director of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program at Harvard, and adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Anthropology. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award.

Hauser has published approximately 200 articles in major research journals as well as several books. The following are a selection of these:

Hauser, M.D., Chen, K., Chen, F., and Chuang, E. (2003). Give unto others: geneti­cally unrelated cotton-top tamarin monkeys preferentially give food to those who give food back. Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, B 270: 2363-2370.

Hauser, M.D. & McDermott, J. (2003). The evolution of the music faculty: A comparative perspective. Nature Neuroscience 6: 663-668.

Fitch, W.T. & Hauser, M.D. (2004). Computational constraints on syntactic processing in nonhuman primates. Science 303: 377-380.

Hauser, M.D. (2000) Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think. New York, Henry Holt.

Kosslyn, Stephen M. — Work in our labora­tory focuses on four general topics: 1) the neural substrate underlying visual mental imagery (for example, we have used PET and fMRI to show that many of the same structures that are involved in object recogni­tion are also involved in imagery); 2) visual display design (for example, we are interested in designing graphs that immediately convey the sense that displayed differences are signifi­cant or non-significant); 3) the neural bases of deception; and 4) the neural bases of indi­vidual differences in information processing abilities and in “cognitive style.”

Some recent papers:

Wraga, M. J., Thompson, W. L., Alpert, N. M., and Kosslyn, S. M. (2003). Implicit transfer of motor strategies in mental rotation. Brain and Cognition, 52, 135-143.

Kosslyn, S. M., and Thompson, W.L. (2003). When is early visual cortex activated during visual mental imagery? Theory and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 723-746.

Kosslyn, S. M., Thompson, W. L., Shep­hard, J. M., Ganis, G., Bell, D., Danovitch, J., Wittenberg, L.A., and Alpert, N. M. (in press). Brain rCBF and performance in visual imagery tasks: Common and distinct processes. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology.

Mitchell, Jason — see listing under Social Psychology

Nakayama, Ken — I am interested in a wide variety of topics in human vision (see http://visionlab.harvard.edu/Members/Ken/nakayama.html) and have recently been exploring two topics. First is a set of projects concerning individual differences in visual perception and memory, especially related to face memory and recognition. We have identi­fied otherwise normal persons who are severely deficient in recognizing faces (called devel­opmental prosopagnosia). There are a signifi­cant number of such individuals, millions perhaps in the US alone, whose deficit leads to significant problems in daily life. Such individuals cluster in families. Comparing these individuals to normal subjects, our goal is to understand the cognitive architecture of face processing, as well as its neurological and genetic substrates. In a second independent effort, we are examining higher order aspects of visuo-motor control, a relatively unexplored topic that has the potential to throw light on otherwise hidden aspects of perception and cognition.

Pinker, Steven — Though Steven Pinker writes books and articles on many aspect of the human mind, his research program is focused on language. In recent years he has studied language development in twins, the contrast between regular and irregular verbs as a way of understanding the interac­tion between memory and rule processing in language, and the patterning of lexical and grammatical processing in the brain using fMRI. Currently he is exploring several ways of using language as a window into human nature, based on ideas from his new book The Stuff of Thought. They include generative metaphors as a window into the organization of knowledge and memory, taboo language (such as swearing) as a window into the emotions, and indirect speech (such as veiled threats, bribes, and propositions) as a window into human social relationships. These studies aim to combine ideas from linguistics, evolu­tionary psychology, cognitive science, and social psychology.

Professor Pinker received his PhD in psychology from Harvard University in 1979, and his BA from McGill University in 1976.

Recent publications include:

Pinker, S. (2007) The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. New York: Viking.

Sahin, N.T., Pinker, S., and Halgren, E. (2006) Abstract grammatical processing of nouns and verbs in Broca‘s Area: Evidence from fMRI. Cortex, 42, 540-562.

Berent, I., Pinker, S., Tzelgov, J., Bibi, U., & Goldfarb, L. (2005) Computation of semantic number from morphological information. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 342-358.

Pinker, S. (2005) So how does the mind work? Mind and Language, 20, 1-24.

Schacter, Daniel — Daniel Schacter received his BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He subsequently developed a keen interest in amnesic disorders associ­ated with various kinds of brain damage. Schacter attempted to integrate the clinical phenomenon of amnesia with experimental and theoretical analyses of normal human memory at the University of Toronto, where he received his PhD in 1981, and at Oxford University, where he spent a year in 1978 as a visiting researcher. He remained on the faculty at Toronto for six years, joined the psychology department at the University of Arizona in 1987, and began as Professor of Psychology at Harvard in 1991. His research interests center on cognitive and neuropsychological analyses of memory, amnesia, and consciousness, with particular emphasis on the distinction between implicit and explicit memory. More recently, he has examined the nature of memory distor­tion and the brain mechanisms underlying false or illusory memories. Schacter’s research involves patients with amnesic syndromes, elderly adults, and functional brain imaging techniques such as positron emission tomog­raphy (PET) and functional magnetic reso­nance imaging (fMRI). Examples of recent research projects include brain imaging studies of implicit and explicit memory for visual objects and false recognition in patients with frontal lobe damage, amnesic patients, and elderly adults. Many of Schacter’s studies are summarized in his 1996 book Searching for Memory: The Brain, The Mind, and The Past. Schacter also has interests in the history of psychology, as illustrated by his 1982 book Stranger Behind the Engram: Theories of Memory and the Psychology of Science.

Representative publications:

Schacter, D.L., Dobbins, I.G., & Schnyer, D.M. (2004). “Specificity of priming: A cognitive neuroscience perspective.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5, 853-862.

Schacter, D.L. & Slotnick, S.D. (2004). “The cognitive neuroscience of memory distortion.” Neuron, 44, 149-160.

Slotnick, S.D. & Schacter, D.L. (2004). “A sensory signature that distinguishes true from false memories.” Nature Neuroscience, 7, 664-672.