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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.
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Atsushi Senju
Birkbeck, University of London, UK http://www.cbcd.bbk.ac.uk/people/scientificstaff/atsushi What does your research focus on? My research focuses on the typical and atypical development of the “social brain” — the network of neural structures specialized to process the social world that enables us to learn effectively from, interact with, and influence the behavior of others. I want to understand how young infants achieve these amazing abilities and how these capacities shape the development of adult social skills.
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Catherine J. Norris
Dartmouth College http://www.dartmouth.edu/~psych/people/faculty/norris.html http://norris.socialpsychology.org/ What does your research focus on? I’m interested in how individuals differ in their responses to emotional stimuli, how these emotional responses are affected by social factors, and the consequences of these patterns of responding for mental and physical health. I’m currently pursuing these interests in three separate lines of research. First, I study basic emotional processes like the negativity bias, the propensity to respond stronger to unpleasant than to pleasant events, and how they differ across individuals.
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Kristina Olson
Yale University, USA www.yale.edu/scdlab/ What does your research focus on? My research sits at the intersection of social and developmental psychology, exploring the emergence and development of social cognition. My lab focuses on three primary areas: (1) the emergence and development of social group attitudes; (2) “strategic pro-sociality,” or the ways in which children are more or less helpful or generous in different contexts; and (3) children’s understanding of ideas and intellectual property. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? The first area that drew me in to experimental psychology was social cognition.
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Kimberly Noble
Columbia University, USA http://www.needlab.cumc.columbia.edu/ What does your research focus on? I study socioeconomic disparities in children’s neurocognitive development. Specifically, we’ve known for decades that there are broad differences in children’s cognitive development and academic achievement as a function of socioeconomic status, or SES. But while classic measures of academic achievement surely reflect the function of the brain, they are relatively uninformative concerning perturbations in specific cognitive and neural processes.