Q&A with Michael Tomasello When Michael Tomasello was an undergraduate student at Duke University studying developmental psychology, he studied the theories of Jean Piaget, a psychologist who thought evolutionarily. “He was looking at children like they were a different species,” Tomasello recalls. “He would always emphasize that they have their […]
Q&A with Catherine Hartley At a special session on the relation between psychology and neuroscience at last year’s CNS conference in San Francisco, Catherine Hartley said: “Even if we can predict behavior, if we don’t know how it works, we likely have not achieved our goals.” While computational algorithms and […]
Q&A with Sam Gershman In the last decade, computational techniques have expanded the toolkit for scientists across disciplines. In neuroscience, computational models are increasingly rendering “visible things that were previously invisible,” says Samuel Gershman, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard University. “Computational modeling is not a niche activity. It’s the same […]
Q&A with Marlene Behrmann For the past 30 years, Marlene Behrmann has been on a mission to answer some of the biggest questions in cognitive neuroscience about how visual function in the brain maps onto structure. Along her journey, she has explored a wide range of topics, including autism, migraines, […]
As a ballet dancer, Emily Avery has always had a great appreciation for people’s ability to execute complex movements, recall choreography, and internalize intricate musicality. Her love of dance is what first drew her to the field of cognitive neuroscience, where a growing body of research is using neuroimaging and […]
Just like when an architect builds a scale model of a building, friends in your close-knit social circle build representational models of you. That’s how Robert Chavez, a social cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oregon, describes the neural representations we have of our friends. “And just like the architectural […]
When we communicate with others, we are constantly monitoring our speech and theirs — taking in multiple external cues — to best engage in meaningful conversation. Despite the multidimensional aspects of speech monitoring, most studies on the topic to date have focused on how we produce a string of accurately […]
For Qing Ceci Cai, a Chinese Ph.D. student at University College London, social laughter has a very personal connection. “As a Chinese student immersing in this very different British culture, I normally fail to understand British humor,” she explains. “So most of the time when I hang out with my […]
The internal battle between the need to act and the need to suppress an action is something I have been through multiple times this summer: trying to suppress the urge to scratch itchy mosquito bites. Such a state is common in everyday life and also important to several clinical disorders […]
Q&A with Stephen Lomber We often see it in superhero movies: When people are deprived of one sense, they develop superhuman powers in another sense. While those depictions may be exaggerated, the underlying premise has a real scientific basis. When the brain is deprived of input from one sense, such […]
March 29–April 1 | 2025
