How is it possible for brain damage to produce disturbances of consciousness restricted to specific sectors of space?

What is the relationship between external stimuli and internal mental representations?

How is language structured in the brain?

Do some concepts have analog (geometric) mental representations in addition to propositional (algebraic) ones?

What functional and neural principles underlie visual aesthetics?

Anjan Chatterjee
Associate Professor
Department of Neurology
E-mail: anjan@mail.med.upenn.edu

My area of interest is in Cognitive Neuroscience and Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology. My research is directed at understanding the architecture and neural bases for human cognition. The structure of cognition is at present (and perhaps in principle) not reduced easily to cellular or molecular explanations. The study of how the brain mediates cognition, while constrained by micro-neural facts, is more directly investigated at higher levels of organization by studying cognition in humans. We use experimental and neuroimaging techniques in normal subjects and examine the neuro-psychological effects of brain damage. A clear understanding of cognitive systems and their breakdown is essential in educating patients and families and critical in designing rational treatment strategies.

Marianna Stark
Department of Neurology
E-mail: mstark@psych.upenn.edu

Research Interests: As the Patient Coordinator for the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN), I am responsible for recruiting and screening patients with focal brain injury to participate in our research program. The goal is to establish a large database of patients for researchers at the CCN who are interested in studying brain-behavior relationships. My personal research interests include multimodal spatial representations and visual attention.

Alexander Kranjec, PhD
E-mail: akranjec@mail.med.upenn.edu

Research Interests:I’m a cognitive psychologist interested in how people represent basic abstract domains like space and time. One of my goals as a researcher is to better
understand how these domains are broadly structured at different levels of
representation (e.g. perceptual, conceptual and linguistic) in the brain. I
look for all sorts of systematic spatiotemporal patterns, ambiguities and
constraints in the physical environment, the mechanical properties of our
bodies, perceptual organization, schematic conceptual structure and language.
Relations found at this level of analysis can be used as jumping-off points to
investigate how primitive units of meaning are constructed and how they shape
our knowledge and experience. Along these lines, I’m currently looking at how
people mentally represent distinct patterns of motion important to linguistic
structure (path and manner) in different brain areas using imaging techniques
(fMRI) and brain lesion methods. Other ongoing work includes behavioral
research that extends traditional psycholinguistic spatial frame of reference
models to temporal concepts.

Eileen Cardillo PhD
E-mail: eica@mail.med.upenn.edu

Research Interests: Broadly speaking, I am interested in the neural adaptations that enabled the emergence of language in our species. My research has primarily considered the operation of domain general processes like selective attention and inhibitory
control in sentence comprehension, using a combination of behavioral and
neuroimaging tasks in healthy adults and individuals with aphasia. I am currently
investigating the recruitment of sensorimotor processes in language by
considering how spatial information is linguistically encoded and neurally
mediated. I am especially interested in embodied approaches to comprehension and
their ability to account for normal comprehension as well as the linguistic
deficits associated with different types of brain injury.

Gwen Schmidt
Email: Schmidtg@email.chop.edu

Research Interests: Broadly construed, my research interests focus on neural models of language comprehension, particularly semantic processing. I became fascinated with the connection between the brain and linguistic behavior as an undergraduate studying linguistics, and pursued this interest as a graduate student in cognitive neuroscience. My primary research interests focus on the neural correlates of figurative language processing, the role of the right hemisphere in language processing, and the connection between right hemisphere language and other right hemisphere cognitive functions. I have a secondary interest in exploring these issues in autism. Some questions I am interested in include the following. What are the mechanisms underlying the right hemisphere involvement in processing broad semantic relationships?   How does the type of metaphor (nominal, predicate, etc) affect processing? Are all types of metaphor equally "figurative"?   How can we explain the literal bias in autism in terms of cognitive mechanisms which are different for people with autism?

Graduate Students:

Prin Amorapanth
Ph.D. Candidate in Neuroscience
Department of Neurology
E-mail: amorapan@mail.med.upenn.edu

Research Interests: How do we structure the spatial relations around us? Are there universal cognitive processes that mediate between perception and language? The hypothesis that I am working with is that there are, and that these mediating processes called schemas, share properties of both spatial and linguistic representations. I will be testing this hypothesis with the closed class grammatical structures of our language (in particular spatial prepositions like above, across, in, on, etc.). I also plan to find out why I am so fascinated with bright shiny objects.

Elaine Wencil
Ph.D. Candidate in Psychology
Department of Psychology
E-mail: ewencil@psych.upenn.edu

Research Interests: A common thread running through my research interests is how the interplay between lower-level perceptual processing and higher-level cognitive functioning result in how we perceive and act in the world. Currently, I am utilizing cognitive neuroscience techniques such as functional imaging to explore temporal processing.

Research Interests:

Research Interests: I am currently an undergraduate in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. I am a member of the University Scholars program for research and have declared a major in "Biological Basis of Behavior." I'm currently conducting research into the changes in subjects' artwork after brain damage.

Research Interests: I received a B.A. in Psychology from Haverford College in 2004. I am currently conducting cognitive neuroscience research working on studies of language and spatial relationships.

Stella

Research Interests: My research focuses on the neurological basis for hiding under couches, eating copiously, and napping on a variety of surfaces. I'm an excellent researcher.