Graduate Training in Brain, Cognitive, and Decision Sciences

The Psychology Graduate Group offers a broad range of research opportunities in brain and cognitive sciences. Faculty and graduate students study the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying perception, attention, learning, memory, language, decision processes, foraging, and neuro-regulatory mechanisms.

Graduate training is based on a research apprenticeship model, but can also involve collaborations between principal investigators in different labs. Doctoral students participate in a rich campus-wide community of researchers from multiple departments and centers offering a wide range of colloquia and informal seminar series. Psychology graduate students studying Brain and Cognitive Sciences also interact closely with graduate students in Neuroscience, Bioengineering, and Linguistics.

Below is a list of faculty and their areas of research interest. Many faculty also maintain lab Web sites that provide more detailed information on their research programs.

	Professional Title	Specific Research Areas
Ted Abel	Professor	Molecular mechanisms of long-term memory storage
Geoffrey Aguirre	Assistant Professor	Neural basis of high-level visual function
Vijay Balasubramanian	Merriam Term Professor of Physics
Jonathan Baron	Professor	biases in judgments and decisions, especially when relevant to public policy
Cristina Bicchieri	Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics	Judgment, decision making, and rational choice
David Brainard	Professor; Director, Vision Research Center; Interim Director, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science	Human vision, visual neuroscience, and computational modeling of visual processing
Anjan Chatterjee	Professor	Cognitive Neuroscience and Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology
Dorothy Cheney	Professor	communication and social behavior of non-human primates
Yale Cohen	Associate Professor	neural correlates of auditory cognition; neural correlates of communication and spatial processing; multimodal perception
H. Branch Coslett	Professor	Cognitive neuroscience of human spatial cognition, motor control, temporal processing and language.
Delphine Dahan	Associate Professor	Language and communication; speech comprehension
Jason Dana	Assistant Professor	Human decision processes
Robert DeRubeis	Samuel H. Preston Term Professor in the Social Sciences; Department Chair	Causes and treatments of mood disorders
David Dinges	Professor	Sleep and chronobiology
Russell Epstein	Associate Professor	Neural bases of visual scene perception and spatial cognition
Martha Farah	Annenberg Professor of Natural Sciences; Director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society	Cognitive, social and developmental neuroscience, especially the effects of socioeconomic status on brain development, and neuroethics
Eduardo Fernandez-Duque	Assistant Professor	Socially monogamous monkeys living both in captivity and in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Argentinean Chaco regions
Loretta Flanagan-Cato	Associate Professor	Behavioral neuroscience; especially hormonal effects on neural circuitry in the hypothalamus
Steven Fluharty	Associate Vice Provost for Research; Professor	Regulation of neuropeptide receptor gene expression and signal transduction
Lila Gleitman	Professor Emeritus	Psycholinguistics; morphological syntactic structure, language acquisition, representations of sound waves
Geoffrey Goodwin	Assistant Professor	Social cognition, moral psychology, and reasoning
Harvey Grill	Professor	Behavioral (feeding) and systems (energy balance, thermoregulation, autonomic) neuroscience; neural bases of obesity and anorexia
Joseph Kable	Assistant Professor	Psychological and neural mechanisms of choice behavior
Michael Kahana	Professor	Human memory and its neural mechanisms
Robert Kurzban	Associate Professor	Evolutionary psychology
Mark Liberman	Professor; Director, Linguistic Data Consortium	Computational linguistics
Javier Medina	Assistant Professor	Neural basis of motor learning
Isabel Muzzio	Assistant Professor	Neural basis of declarative memory
Adrian Raine	Richard Perry University Professor; Chair, Department of Criminology	Neurobiology of antisocial behavior in children and adults
Robert Rescorla	Professor Emeritus	Associative learning processes
Paul Rozin	Professor	Cultural psychology, with a focus on understanding the role of food in human life positive psychology and ethnopolitical conflict
Nicole Rust	Assistant Professor	Neural basis of object recognition
Marc Schmidt	Associate Professor; Director of Biological Basis of Behavior program	Encoding of complex motor behaviors; auditory feedback and vocal learning
Robert Schultz	Professor; Director of the Center for Autism Research	Pathobiology and treatment of autism
Florian Schwarz	Assistant Professor	My main interests are in formal semantics and pragmatics of natural language. I also do psycholinguistic research, especially on semantic and pragmatic processing.
Robert Seyfarth	Professor	Social behavior, vocal communication, and cognition of nonhuman primates in their natural habitat
Uri Simonsohn	Associate Professor	Judgment and Decision Making; Psychology; Methodology; Behavioral Economics
Saul Sternberg	Professor	Human experimental and mathematical psychology: short-term dynamics of visual representation; brain and biomechanics in timing repeated movements; reaction-time methods and information-processing models.
Alan Stocker	Assistant Professor	Models of visual perception; linking theory to psychophysical and physiological data
Daniel Swingley	Associate Professor	Word recognition, word learning, and lexical representation in infants and young children
Philip Tetlock	Leonore Annenberg University Professor
Sharon Thompson-Schill	Class of 1965 Term Professor; Director of Undergraduate Studies; Director of the Undergraduate Honors Program; Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience	Neural basis of human memory and language with an emphasis on semantic memory and frontal lobe function
John Trueswell	Professor; Graduate Group Chair	Word learning, grammar learning, and real-time language comprehension
Claudia Valeggia	Associate Professor	Human reproductive biology and the ecological and cultural context in which it develops
Charles Yang	Associate Professor	Language acquisition and change; Morphology and the mental lexicon; Computational linguistics; The evolution of language and cognition
Gal Zauberman	Associate Professor	consumer behavior, time in judgment and decision making, and memory for emotions and choice