Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Working memory capacity and fluid intelligence are highly related as shown by labs around the world and in any populations.  My recent work demonstrates that individual differences in ability to control attention underlies this relationship.  Attention control is both a state and a trait variable. Measures of attention control are highly reliable and valid predictors of performance in multitasking...

How many published articles and grant awards would you like to add to your CV this year? The more the better, right? But is life in the fast lane really the best way to do science? In her Trends in Cognitive Science ( January 2020, vol. 24, no. 1 ) article, Uta Frith ( University College, London ) asserts that Fast Science is bad for scientists and for science.  She provides suggestions for ways i...

John Lindo interviewed by Dietrch Stout , Associate Director CMBC. EDUCATION Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Chicago, 2015-2017 PhD, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, 2015 MA, University of Pennsylvania, 2010 RESEARCH Ancient DNA Population Genetics Pathogen-Host Interactions Canine Social Evolution Human Adaptation to Changing Environments The Biological Effects of Colonizat...

Arber Tasimi interviewed by Lynne Nygaard , Director CMBC. BIO Dr. Arber Tasimi received his B.A. in Psychology with Honors from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 where he graduated summa cum laude. He then attended Yale University, earning his Ph. D. in 2017. Dr. Tasimi held a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University from 2017-2020 and joined the Department of Psychology at Emory Unive...

  Lauren Klein interviewed by Lynne Nygaard , Director CMBC. Lauren Klein is an associate professor in the Departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University. She received her A.B. from Harvard University and her Ph. D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her research interests include digital humanities, data science, data studies, and ear...

Ken Carter interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC Dr. Ken Carter is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology at Oxford College of Emory University, where he teaches introductory courses in psychology as well as advanced courses in clinical psychopharmacology, research methods, and personality. Before joining the Oxford College faculty in 1994, Carter served as a senior assistant researc...

Daniel Dilks (dilkslab) interviewed by Lynne Nygaard , Director CMBC BIO Daniel D. Dilks received his Ph. D. in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2005, after which he became a Postdoctoral Fellow, and later a Research Fellow, in the Kanwisher Laboratory at MIT. He joined the Emory faculty in September 2013. His research focuses on three big questions about human vision: i) How is...

Mel Konner interviewed by Lynne Nygaard , Director CMBC EDUCATION PhD, Harvard University, 1973 MD, Harvard Medical School, 1985 A.B. , Anthropology, CUNY, Brooklyn College, 1966 BIO Melvin (Mel) Konner came to Emory in 1983 as the first Chair of the newly-created Department of Anthropology. He co-founded the Anthropology & Human Biology major and has been a core member of the Neuroscience and Beh...

Marcela Benitez interviewed by Dietrich Stout , Associate Director CMBC.   BIO As a broadly trained primatologist, I am interested in the evolution of primate social cognition, the mechanisms that influence social choices, and under what context these decisions are adaptive. I received a joint Ph. D. in Biological Anthropology and Biopsychology from the University of Michigan in 2016 and recently...

An interdisciplinary discussion about the intersection of Theater and Linguistics, and specifically their approach to dialects.  The lunch will explore language, and its performance, through the lens of emotion, culture, and practice.      If you would like to become an AFFILIATE of the Center, please let us know. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get updates on our latest videos. Follow along w...

No sensory system is an island.  The auditory and visual systems work together to provide information about the nature of the events occurring in the environment.  I will talk about why they do this, where in the brain it happens, and how the brain performs the necessary computations to achieve it.  I will emphasize the following general insights:  1. Interactions between sensory systems occur at...

Media require active perception from their users. Videogames provide perhaps the most obvious example of this; in order to perceive the world of a videogame, a user must play the game, negotiating its spaces and manipulating its objects. While perception of cinema may be less obviously active, it is in fact no less active than is perception of games. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, the emerg...

Tool making and use are often considered a hallmark of intelligence: the discovery that New Caledonian crows made tools caused a flurry of excitement in the world of animal cognition with much talk of 'feathered apes’.  Of the explanations for the rarity of tool making across the animal kingdom (e.g. brain size, group size, sociality), none appear satisfactory.  The rarity of the behaviour makes i...

To start with, the talk will review and update the hypothesis ( How the Brain Got Language, Oxford University Press, 2012) that early Homo sapiens were language-ready in the sense that they had brains that could have supported language had it already been developed – but they were not language-using. The approach sees protolanguage emerging from complex recognition and imitation of manual skills v...

Although using tools is a central feature of human biology, the lack of biologically-grounded theory in this domain limits our ability to study the phenomenon to relate it to human evolution. To begin to fill this gap, I present a theory of tooling applicable to individuals of all species. The theory draws on (a) ecological (perception–action) theory in psychology, that links an animal’s behavior...

Jumping spiders (family Salticidae) have unique, complex eyes and a capacity for spatial vision exceeding that for any other animals of similar size. Most salticid species prey on insects but some species from a subfamily, Spartaeinae, are known to express an active preference for other spiders as prey (‘araneophagy’). We can gain important insights into animal cognition by exploring how these spe...

Introduction by Laura Emmery, Emory University, Department of Music  Emory Music Department's McDowell Lecture Series with Co-Sponsored by CMBC, The Hightower Fund, and the Program in Linguistics presents: Lawrence Zbikowski, Professor of Music and the Humanities, University of Chicago "Music and the Language of Emotions"  His research focuses on the application of recent work in cognitive science...

Contemporary psychology and neuroscience have shed little light on mental states associated with enhanced cognitive capacities. We report the existence of enhanced cognitive states, in which dramatic temporary enhancements in focused attention were observed in participants, engaged in high-arousal activities (playing action videogames, solving physical puzzle games in escape rooms, or performing H...

MARIEKE VAN VUGT Neuroscience, University of Groningen, NL From Tibetan monks to dancers and back: trying to understand the role of inter-brain synchrony in human connection While laboratory research can tell us many interesting things, there are many situations that are not captured by existing paradigms. In this talk, I will share my experience investigating the practice of monastic debate, a re...

LENA TING Biomedical Engineering , Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University Neuromechanics of balance: from flamingos to dancers Our ability to move in the world, and even to stand upright depend on complex and flexible neuromechanical interactions. Our experimental and computational studies of balance in one-, two-, and four-legged standing have revealed many ways that the brain and b...

AUDREY DUARTE Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology How measuring the sleeping brain at home can help us understand aging and Alzheimer’s disease One of the most common and arguably most distressing cognitive declines in aging, in large part because it is also an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease, is in episodic memory. As people age, they report more everyday difficulties in, for example, r...

KAREN ROMMELFANGER Neurology, Emory University School of Medicine Challenges in digital phenotyping: predicting brain health with phones, social media, and beyond The landscape of healthcare is changing worldwide and in no small part due to the transformation to early detection and intervention and digital technologies in health. Digital phenotyping research and the insights that will be revealed...

KATHY TRANG Anthropology, Emory University Coloring perception: Neurocognitive predictors of real-time mental health vulnerability among highly traumatized men. Attending to the everyday life-worlds of vulnerable populations has been a key manifest of biocultural anthropology. Ecological momentary assessments and neurocognitive methods play a critical role in illuminating not only the differential...

SUZANNE DIKKER Neuroscience, Utrech University, NL and New York University Brains in harmony: Connecting art, neuroscience and education outside of the laboratory. Neuroscience research has produced tremendous insight into how the human brain supports dynamic social interactions. Still, laboratory-generated findings do not always straightforwardly generalize to real-world environments. To fill thi...

The notion that cognition comprises more than computations of a central nervous system operating on representations has gained a foothold in human cognitive science for a few decades now. Various brands of embodied, extended, and enactive cognition, some more conservative and some more liberal, have paraded in philosophy and cognitive science. I call the genus including all such species situated c...