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Peter Kuppens
University of Leuven, Belgium http://ppw.kuleuven.be/okp/people/Peter_Kuppens/byYearType/ What does your research focus on? I study emotions, specifically I’ve been trying to make sense of the patterns with which our emotions change across time, and what we can learn from them to understand what makes people happy or miserable. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? My answer to the first question is silly: I applied for a PhD position on the topic of anger and got the job.
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Paul E. Dux
University of Queensland, Australia www.paulduxlab.org What does your research focus on? Our world constantly serves up far more sensory information than can be processed at the level of awareness. Thus, it is vital that humans are able to sort the important information from the irrelevant, and select the correct responses to this information from a veritable plethora of options. These tasks are thought to be undertaken by the attention system and I am interested in understanding the cognitive and neural underpinnings of this system and, in particular, the mechanism(s) that give rise to the capacity limitations of attention.
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Phillip Atiba Goff
Executive Director of Research, Consortium for Police Leadership in Equity www.policingequity.org University of California, Los Angeles www.psych.ucla.edu/faculty/faculty_page?id=147&area=7 What does your research focus on? My research focuses on contemporary racial and gender discrimination, particularly in the domain of criminal justice. It is inspired by a single question: How does one explain persistent racial inequality in the face of declining explicit racial prejudice? This question summarizes the conundrum of many contemporary intergroup conflicts and presents difficult practical and theoretical challenges to traditional psychological approaches to bias and discrimination.
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Nash Unsworth
University of Oregon, USA http://maidlab.uoregon.edu/index.html What does your research focus on? My research focuses on working memory, attention control, long-term memory retrieval and individual differences in those processes. In particular, our work focuses on how individuals rely on attention to actively maintain information over the short term and how they retrieve information from long-term memory when that information could not be maintained. Furthermore, a major focus of our work is to examine individual differences in these processes and to determine how they are related to higher-order cognitive processes such as intelligence and reasoning. What drew you to this line of research?
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Modupe Akinola
Columbia Business School, USA www4.gsb.columbia.edu/cbs-directory/detail/731784/Modupe%20Akinola What does your research focus on? I study how stress affects performance. My research focuses on understanding how organizational environments, characterized by deadlines and multi-tasking, can engender stress, and how this stress can have spill-over effects on performance. I use a multi-method approach that includes behavioral observation, implicit and reaction time measures, and physiological responses (specifically hormonal and cardiovascular responses) to examine how cognitive outcomes are affected by stress. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you?
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Michael C. Frank
Stanford University, USA http://langcog.stanford.edu What does your research focus on? I study the intersection between social cognition and language acquisition: I try to understand how the social context of interactions between children and caregivers provides information for children to learn the meanings of words and how they go together in sentences. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? I’ve always been someone who is interested in language and wordplay, and at a certain point it occurred to me just how strange it is that we’re able to communicate with each other at all.
