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Marcel Just Ph.D. D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology and the Center's Director. Just, M. A., Cherkassky, V. L., Keller, T. A., Kana, R. K., & Minshew, N. J. (in press). Functional and anatomical cortical underconnectivity in autism: Evidence from an fMRI study of an executive function task and corpus callosum morphometry. Cerebral Cortex. |
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Augusto Buchweitz, Ph.D. Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUCRS), Brazil and researcher at the Brain Institute (InsCer) at PUCRS. He is a former Post-Doctoral Fellow at the CCBI working on fMRI studies of bilingual text comprehension, neurosemantics, and multi-tasking. Buchweitz, A., Mason, R. A., Tomitch, L. M. B., & Just, M. A. (2009). Brain activation for reading and listening comprehension: An fMRI study of modality effects and individual differences in language comprehension. Psychology & Neuroscience, 2, 111-123. |
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Inmaculada Escudero, Ph.D. is a Visiting Scholar from Spain. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of General Psychology at Autónoma University of Madrid. Her current interests are in text comprehension, causal cognition, and neural correlates of inferencing. She is currently using fMRI with the aim of combining behavioral and neuroimaging techniques to further investigate the cognitive and neural bases of inference processes. Escudero, I. & León, J.A. (in press). Discourse comprehension processes between types of texts: A cross-language study based on elaborative inferences generation. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. |
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Zohar Eviatar, Ph.D. Dr. Eviatar is a member of the Institute for Information Processing and Decision Making, and of the Psychology Department at the University of Haifa. Her work revolves around brain mechanisms for language, with special emphasis on hemispheric functions in different languages and in special populations. Sapir, S., Maimon, T., & Eviatar, Z. (2002)Linguistic and Nonlinguistic Auditory Processing of Rapid Vowel Formant (F2)Modulations in University Students with and without Developmental Dyslexia. Brain and Cognition, 48(2/3), 520-526. |
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Cleotilde (Coty) Gonzalez, Ph.D. Associate Research Professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences. Director of the Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory. She earned her Ph. D. from Texas Tech University. Her research goals are: to understand decision-making cognitive processes in complex, real-time, dynamic environments and to help people make better decisions in these situations. Her research is mainly behavioral, using realistic computer simulations. Other methods include computational cognitive modeling, eye tracking, and fMRI. Gonzalez C., & Wimisberg, J. (2007). Situation awareness in dynamic decision-making: Effects of practice and working memory. Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making, 1(1), 56-74. |
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Rajesh Kumar Kana, Ph.D. Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is a former CCBI Post-Doctoral Fellow working on fMRI studies of autism. His primary research interest is to explore the neural substrates of social cognition and the impact of social cognition on language, communication and other cognitive functions in autism. He uses functional and structural MRI to study the neural architecture of autism. Kana, R.K., Keller, T.A., Minshew, N .J., & Just, M.A. (2007). Inhibitory Control in High Functioning Autism: Decreased Activation and Underconnectivity in Inhibition Networks. Biological Psychiatry, 62, 198-206. |
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Tim Keller, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Associate with expertise in fMRI. He is working on all of the fMRI projects. He has just the right computational skills to deal with the intensive data processing associated with fMRI data, as well as neuroanatomical knowledge for data interpretation. His substantive interests are in working memory, language, and spatial thinking. His Ph.D. is from the University of Missouri. He was previously an NIMH Post-Doctoral Fellow for two years. Keller, T. A., Kana, R. K., & Just, M. A. (in press). A developmental study of the structural integrity of white matter in autism. NeuroReport. |
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Hidetsugu (Hide) Komeda, Ph.D. is a research psychologist in the area of cognitive psychology in autism. His Ph.D. is from Kyoto University, Japan. He is working on fMRI studies of cognitive, perceptual, and social processes in autism. Rapp, D.N., Komeda, H., & Hinze, S.R. (2011). Vivifications of literary investigation. The Scientific Study of Literature, 1, 123-135. |
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Hideya Koshino, Ph.D. Assistant Professor at California State University at San Bernadino. He is a former CCBI Post-Doctoral Fellow working in the area of attention, executive function, spatial information, and autism. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. He is continuing his CCBI work using tele-collaboration and summer visits. Koshino, H., Carpenter, P. A., Cherkassky, V. L., Keller, T. A., & Just, M. A. (2005). Functional connectivity in an fMRI working memory task in high-functioning autism. NeuroImage, 24, 810-821. |
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Jose A. León, Ph.D. is a Visiting Scholar from Spain. He is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the Autónoma University of Madrid. Dr. León teaches courses in cognitive mechanisms of Language and Discourse Comprehension, Knowledge Acquisition and Reading Processes in text comprehension. His primary interests are in the cognitive mechanisms underlying language comprehension and discourse, inferences, causality, mental representations and reading. His current research is focused on fMRI studies in processing of backward/forward inferences and causal cognition. León, J.A., Olmos, R., Escudero, Cañas, J.J. & Salmerón, L. (in press). Assessing Short Summaries With Human Judgments Procedure and Latent Semantic Analysis in narrative and expository texts. Behavioral Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers Journal. |
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Yanni Liu, Ph.D. is a former CCBI Post-Doctoral Fellow. She completed her PhD at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her doctoral research focused on the executive function and decision-making processes of normal people and OCD patients. She is currently using fMRI to investigate the perceptual superiority and executive dysfunction in Autism spectrum disorder. Liu, Y., & Gehring, W. J. (2009). Loss Feedback Negativity Elicited by Single- vs. Conjoined-Feature Stimuli. Neuroreport, 20(6), 632-636. |
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Robert Mason, Ph.D. is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the area of language processing. His Ph.D. is from the University of Massachusetts. He is interested in the use of fMRI and eye movements as a measure of cognitive workload in language, particularly syntactic and discourse processing. He has begun working on fMRI studies of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Mason, R.A., & Just, M.A. (2004). How the brain processes causal inferences in text: A theoretical account of generation and integration component processes utilizing both cerebral hemispheres. Psychological Science, 15, 1-7. |
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Nancy J. Minshew, Ph.D. Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, is a research neurologist who has developed a theory of cognitive and neural deficits in autism. Her research, conducted in collaboration with her extensive research team, has completed large-scale neuropsychologic studies, eye movement and posturography studies, structural MRI, and MRS (magnetic resonance spectroscopy) of high functioning autistic individuals. This research has resulted in the definition of deficits in complex cognitive abilities across domains with the exception of the visuospatial domain and evidence of neocortical systems as the primary site of CNS dysfunction in autism. Minshew, N.J., Luna, B., & Sweeney, J.A. (1999). Oculomotor evidence for neocortical systems but not cerebellar dysfunction in autism. Neurology, 52, 917-922. |
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Tom Mitchell, Ph.D. Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery (CALD). One of the leading figures in machine learning, his research employs various statistical and analytic methods in an effort to construct computer programs (algorithms) that learn from experience. His work with the CCBI conjoins machine learning with neuroimaging to help form theories of brain function, using classifiers to find stimulus unique patterns of brain activation. In essence, the machine learning algorithms are being trained to detect cognitive states. He also directs CALD, an interdisciplinary center whose mission is to invent new methods for using historical data to improve future decision |
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Sharlene Newman, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Psychology at Indiana University. She earned her Ph.D. at the Biomedical Engineering Department of the University of Alabama at Birmingham and is a former CCBI Post-Doctoral Fellow. Her research interests are in the areas of fMRI of language processes, problem-solving, and planning. Just, M. A., Newman, S. D., Keller, T. A., McElaney, A., & Carpenter, P. A.. (2004) Imagery in sentence comprehension: An fMRI study. NeuroImage. |
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Susana Novais-Santos, Ph.D. is a former CCBI Postdoctoral Fellow. She obtained her first Master's in Computer Science and Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal. Susana then got an MSc in Engineering and Physical Science in Medicine at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of London, UK. She obtained her PhD in Bioengineering (Neuroengineering) at the University of Pennsylvania. Her areas of expertise are language processing, cognition, executive resources, strategic planning and decision-making. |
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Francisco Pereira is a postdoctoral assistant at the Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behaviour of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Previously he was a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at CMU and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, working in collaboration with the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. He is interested in the application of machine
learning techniques to the analysis of fMRI data and their use in building
better cognitive models. He sees this as a stepping stone in the path to
the creation of Artificial Intelligence. Francisco has a B.Sc. in Computer
Science from the University of Porto, Portugal. Mitchell T., Hutchinson R., Just M., Newman S., Niculescu S., Pereira F., Wang X. (2002). Machine Learning of fMRI Virtual Sensors of Cognitive States. Functional Neuroimaging workshop at Neural Information Processing Systems. |
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Chantel Prat, Ph.D. Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, with appointments in
Psychology and at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. Chantel is a former member of the CCBI. Her research investigates the nature of biological constraints on information processing, with an emphasis on the neural correlates of individual differences in language
comprehension abilities. Her current research employs the combination of fMRI, TMS, DTI,
and behavioral paradigms to investigate the neural basis of individual differences in language
and cognition.
Prat, C. S., Mason, R. A., & Just, M. A. in press. Individual differences in the neural basis of causal inferencing. Brain & Language. |
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Walter Schneider, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. Dr. Schneider investigates dynamic cortical processing through human behavioral and brain imaging studies, as well as computer simulation models. Behavioral and brain imaging studies focus on understanding the processes involved in human learning and attention allocation. His research examines cortical areas involved in both learning and sensory processing. The data from these studies is used to detail how rapidly and in what forms attention moves and what are the component structures of learning (goal popping, memory retrieval, feedback processing). His CCBI-related work is on fMRI studies of automaticity in high level cognition, bringing his pioneering expertise in automaticity to apply to cortical function in complex tasks |
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Svetlana Shinkareva, Ph.D. Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina. She is a former CCBI Post-Doctoral Fellow. Dr. Shinkareva’s research focuses on the development and application of quantitative methods to neuroimaging data. Her current interests include applying machine learning methods to fMRI data to study the neural basis of semantic knowledge representation. Shinkareva, S.V., Mason, R.A., Malave, V.L., Wang, W., Mitchell, T.M., et al (2008). Using fMRI brain activation to identify cognitive states associated with perception of tools and dwellings. PLoS ONE 3(1): e1394. |
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Diane Williams, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at Duquesne University, working on behavioral and fMRI studies of cognitive and linguistic processing in individuals with autism under the mentorship of Dr. Just. She has a Research Career Development Award from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Dr. Williams completed her doctoral work at Bowling Green State University in Ohio in Speech-Language Pathology. She was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Nancy Minshew, Director of the Collaborative Program of Excellence in Autism at the University of Pittsburgh, and continues to collaborate with Dr. Minshew on a number of studies with high-functioning adolescents and adults with autism. Dr. Williams has more than 20 years of clinical experience with individuals with autism. Minshew, N.J., & Williams, D.L. (in press). The new neurobiology of autism: Cortex, connectivity, and neuronal organization. Archives of Neurology.. |