People - Faculty

Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science

Dr. Amodio’s research examines the roles of social cognition and emotion in the regulation of behavior, and the neural mechanisms underlying these processes. Much of his work examines these processes in the context of prejudice and stereotyping, although his interests extend to the areas of motivation and health psychology. Although the questions that guide this research address classic social psychological issues, his approach is interdisciplinary; he  integrates theory and methodology from social psychology, cognitive/affective neuroscience, and psychophysiology to inform his hypotheses and the designs of his studies.

Email: david.amodio@nyu.edu

Site: www.amodiolab.org

Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University

Dr. Phelps’ research examines the cognitive neuroscience of emotion, learning and memory. Her primary focus has been to understand how human learning and memory are changed by emotion and to investigate the neural systems mediating their interactions. She have approached this topic from a number of different perspectives, with an aim of achieving a more global understanding of the complex relations between emotion and memory. As much as possible, she have tried to let the questions drive the research, not the techniques or traditional definitions of research areas. She has used a number of techniques (behavioral studies, physiological measurements, brain-lesion studies, fMRI) and have worked with a number of collaborators in other domains (social and clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, economists, physicists).

Email: liz.phelps@nyu.edu

Site: www.psych.nyu.edu/phelpslab/

Department of Psychology, New York University

Dr. Van Bavel studies how values, identities and motivations organize social perception and evaluation, and the underlying neural mechanisms that mediate these processes. This work builds on some basic assumptions about the dynamic nature of human perception and evaluation that are different from the dual process models that permeate psychology. My primary line of research takes a multi-level approach to self-categorization and social identity, blending theory and methods from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Other lines of research explore the flexibility of moral judgment and the effects of social context and individual differences on social perception and evaluation.

Email: jay.vanbavel@nyu.edu

Site: www.psych.nyu.edu/vanbavel/lab/

Department of Applied Psychology, New York University

Dr. Blair studies self-regulation in young children. His primary interest concerns the development of cognitive abilities referred to as executive functions and the ways in which these aspects of cognition are important for school readiness and early school achievement. He is also interested in the development and evaluation of preschool and elementary school curricula designed to promote executive functions as a means of preventing school failure. In 2002, Blair and his colleagues at Penn State University and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill received funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for a longitudinal, population-based study of family ecology and child development beginning at birth. In his part of the project, Blair is examining interaction between early experiential and biological influences on the development of executive functions and related aspects of self-regulation. Ultimately, Blair and his colleagues plan to follow this sample through the school years and into young adulthood. Prior to coming to NYU, Blair spent ten years as an assistant and then associate professor in the department of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State. He received his doctorate in developmental psychology and a master’s degree in public health from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1996.

Email: cbb5@nyu.edu

Site: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/appsych/faculty_bios/view/Clancy_Blair

Department of Philosophy, Department of Psychology, and Center for Neural Science, New York University

Dr. Block, Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science, came to NYU in 1996 from MIT where he was Chair of the Philosophy Program. He works in philosophy of mind and foundations of neuroscience and cognitive science and is currently writing a book on consciousness. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, a Sloan Foundation Fellow, a faculty member at two National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institutes and two Summer Seminars, the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Science Foundation; and a recipient of the Robert A. Muh Alumni Award in Humanities and Social Science from MIT. He is a past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a past Chair of the MIT Press Cognitive Science Board, and past President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.

Email: ned.block@nyu.edu

Site: www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/

Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University

Email: clayton.curtis@nyu.edu

Site: clayspace.psych.nyu.edu/

Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University

How are memories formed? Why do we only remember some of what we encounter? Why do we remember some events in exquisitely rich detail, only have a sense or feeling that we’ve encountered other events and still forget others entirely? These are some of the questions that we are exploring in the laboratory. Our laboratory complements cognitive behavioral approaches with a pursuit of knowledge of how the brain carries out mnemonic functions (using fMRI) with the belief that this approach will lead to a unified study of memory in which structure (i.e. the brain) and function (i.e. behavior) will finally be linked. This union will allow for more complex hypothesis testing than either approach on its own. Our main goals for future research are to (1) further probe the distinct roles that medial temporal lobe regions may play in memory formation, (2) examine whether a functional architecture exists within the hippocampus and what particular kinds of context are supported by this system and (3) investigate the specificity of the medial temporal lobe memory system to long-term declarative memory as there is increasing evidence that it may play a role in short-term or working memory processes as well as implicit learning.

Email: lila.davachi@nyu.edu

Site: tina.cns.nyu.edu/DavachiLab

Department of Politics, New York University

The primary goal of my research is to identify and clarify the sources of individual differences in political preferences and behaviors.  My work tends to utilize genetically informative samples, as well as experimental methods, in order to better understand why some individuals participate in politics while others do not as well as the types of political acts citizens choose to engage in.  My recent work studies these individual differences within and across several developed countries.

Email: cdawes@nyu.edu

Site: http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/chrisdawes.html

Center for Neural Science, Department of Economics, and Department of Psychology, New York University

Over the past decade my laboratory has focused on the identification and characterization of signals that intervene between the neural processes that engage in sensory encoding and the neural processes that engage in movement generation. These are the signals which must, in principle, underlie decision-making. My laboratory studies these processes using a variety of tools that are drawn from the fields of neuroscience, economics and psychology, and our methodologies range from single neuron electrophysiology to fMRI to game theory. In a similar way, the members of my laboratory include scientists with primary training in neurobiology, economics, and psychology. The long-term goal of my research is to describe the neural events that underlie behavioral decision making by employing an interdisciplinary approach, combining mathematical economic and traditional neurobiological tools. By using these tools in our physiological analyses we hope to develop a coherent view of how the brain makes decisions.

Email: glimcher@cns.nyu.edu

Site: www.cns.nyu.edu/~glimcher/

Department of Psychology, New York University

Dr. Gollwitzer’s research concerns the question of how goals and plans affect cognition and behavior. It spans a number of areas in social psychology, cognition and perception, neuropsychology, and industrial and organizational psychology.

Email: peter.gollwitzer@nyu.edu

Site: www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/

Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University

David J. Heeger is a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, a research scientist at the NASA-Ames Research Center, and an Associate Professor at Stanford before coming NYU. His research spans an interdisciplinary cross-section of engineering, psychology, and neuroscience, the current focus of which is to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and computational theory to quantitatively investigate the relationship between brain and behavior. He was awarded the David Marr Prize in computer vision in 1987, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in neuroscience in 1994, the Troland Award in psychology from the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, and the Margaret and Herman Sokol Faculty Award in the Sciences from New York University in 2006.

Email: david.heeger@nyu.edu

Site: www.cns.nyu.edu/~david/

Department of Psychology, New York University (Professor of Psychology and Politics)

Most of my work focuses on theoretical and empirical implications of a system justification theory, which was first proposed by Jost andBanaji (1994) and updated by Jost and Van Der Toorn (2012). There are two major goals of system justification theory, and much of my experimental and survey research has addressed one or both of these goals. The first goal is to understand how and why people provide cognitive and ideological support for the status quo, even when their support appears to conflict with personal and group interests. The second is to analyze the social, psychological, and political antecedents and consequences of supporting the status quo, especially for members of disadvantaged groups.

Email: john.jost@nyu.edu

Site: http://www.psych.nyu.edu/jostlab/

Center for Neural Science, New York University

Dr. LeDoux’s research is aimed at understanding the biological mechanisms of emotional memory. His lab is particularly interested in how the brain learns and stores information about danger. Using classical fear conditioning as way of inducing emotional memories in rats, they have mapped the neural pathways by which sensory stimuli enter and flow through the brain in the process of fear learning. Conceptual issues being explored include the following. Does the same basic system that has been uncovered for the conditioning of reflexive responses also apply to voluntary behavioral responses in dangerous situations or do other networks become involved? How does the brain regulate fear, as in extinction or other processes? Are other emotions mediated by similar or different circuits? What are the mechanisms through which conscious emotional feelings, as opposed to behavioral or autonomic responses, come about?

Email: ledoux@cns.nyu.edu

Site: www.cns.nyu.edu/ledoux/

Department of Psychology, New York University

Dr. Oettingen’s research addresses two broad questions: (1) What self-regulatory strategies can people use to turn their positive fantasies about the future into binding goals, and (2) what self-regulatory strategies can people use to disengage from their goals? The research relates to various areas in social and personality psychology, developmental and educational psychology, as well as health and clinical psychology.

Email: gabriele.oettingen@nyu.edu

Site: www.psych.nyu.edu/oettingen/

Department of Psychology, New York University

Dr. Quadflieg completed a BA at the University of Jena, a PhD at the University of Aberdeen, and Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Louvain before starting as an Assistant Professor at New York University Abu Dhabi in September 2011. Since her undergraduate studies she has been fascinated by the strategies that humans adopt when trying to make sense of each other. By using functional magnetic resonance imaging in combination with behavioral and self-report measures, she investigates aspects of person perception and person understanding. Her work also focuses on the representation and neural implementation of social knowledge (e.g., stereotypic beliefs, mental state knowledge).

Email: susanne.quadflieg@nyu.edu

Site: quadflieg.socialpsychology.org/

Center for Neural Science, New York University

Dr. Rubin studies human visual perception. Her research is aimed at understanding the computations that transform the retinal image to the rich visual representations we experience, and the neural basis of these computations. The topics that she has concentrated on studying are scene segmentation, motion perception and perceptual learning. She combines psychophysical experiments, brain imaging (fMRI) and theoretical analysis to ask questions such as: what are the brain computations that give rise to the perceptual completion of occluded surfaces? How do we perceive objects moving and twisting in three-dimensional space when only their projected, two-dimensional image is given to us? Another interest is perceptual bi-stability: given an ambiguous stimulus that can be interpreted in two (or more) very different ways, perception switches in a seemingly-haphazard manner between the possible interpretations; an important observation is that in such ‘rivalrous’ situations we can only percive one interpretation at a time; she calls this ‘the principle of mutual exclusivity’; how does the brain enforce mutual exclusivity — and why?! More recently, Dr, Rubin has become interested also in applying fMRI to study the neural basis of Social Cognition. In particular, she is interested in the representation of unconscious goals and their effect on behavior.

Email: nava.rubin@nyu.edu

Site: www.cns.nyu.edu/corefaculty/Rubin.php

Center for Neural Science, New York University

The major goal the Suzuki Laboratory is to understand the neural signals underlying the formation and representation of declarative/relational memory in the monkey brain. One form of declarative/relational memory we have focused on is associative memory, defined as the ability to associate two unrelated items in memory. We have shown that many cells in the monkey hippocampus signal learning of new associations with dramatic changes in their firing rate (Wirth et al., 2003). Recent functional imaging studies have shown that similar changes in activity are seen in the human medial temporal (Law et al., 2005). We have also shown that hippocampal neurons signal well- learned information with a significantly more selective response compared to novel information (Yanike et al., 2004). Current work is examining how the hippocampus interacts with other brain areas during the associative learning process. Another major goal in the lab is the development of a novel battery of medial temporal lobe-dependent memory tasks to use in our neurophysiological studies. This battery includes tasks of temporal order memory designed to mimic the kind of memory required in episodic memories, a form of declarative/relational memory. We are also in the process of developing a novel family of naturalistic memory tasks based on memory for social interactions that are designed to tap the natural learning and memory tasks that monkeys have evolved to solve. A long-term goal is to understand not only how medial temporal lobe areas contribute to theses tasks, but also how the medial temporal lobe may interact with other brain areas including the prefrontal cortex and striatum during both acquisition and retrieval of declarative/relational information.

Email: wendy@cns.nyu.edu

Site: www.cns.nyu.edu/corefaculty/Suzuki.php

Department of Psychology, New York University

Dr. Trope is conducting three lines of research. The first investigates how psychological distance (temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance, and hypotheticality) influences the representations of objects and, thereby, the predictions, evaluations, and choice individuals make regarding those objects. The second line of research investigates self control processes, namely, how individual resolve conflicts between their long-term, global, concerns and their short-term local concerns. The third line of research distinguishes between analytic and associative thinking and examines the role of affective states and personal desires on social judgment and decision making.

Email: yaacov.trope@nyu.edu

Site: www.psych.nyu.edu/tropelab/

Department of Psychology, New York University

How we perceive other people is affected by many factors, including factors we do not intend to consider and may even be unaware of. Indeed, impression formation occurs “spontaneously” (unconsciously) as well as consciously. My lab studies how people infer traits and other personal characteristics from behavioral and social category information, both consciously and unconsciously. We use a rage of cognitive measures (e.g., memories and reaction times), motivation manipulations, cultural variations, and quantitative models (e.g., PDP and Quad models of controlled and automatic processes). Social neuroscience provides powerful methods for isolating and measuring relevant processes, and for distinguishing among competing theories of how we form impressions of others. It also suggests new models.

I earned my Ph.D. at Harvard after an undergraduate education at Caltech and the Univ. of Michigan. I’m a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, the Society for the Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. My research has been funded by the NSF and the NIMH. I directed the doctoral program in social psychology at NYU for over 20 years. Although not formally trained in social neuroscience, I am an enthusiastic collaborator with those who were, and am pleased to count some former students among their ranks.

Email: jim.uleman@nyu.edu

Site: http://www.psych.nyu.edu/uleman/