Lab Personnel
 
Lab Director:
 

Anjan Chatterjee
Professor of Neurology
Department of Neurology
E-mail: anjan[at]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.

 

Post-Doctoral Fellows:

 

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.

 

Christine Watson, PHD
E-mail: watsonc@mail.med.upenn.edu

Research Interests: I am interested in the way in which we represent purely linguistic and sensory-motor conceptual knowledge -- and the degree to which these ostensibly different kinds of information interact.  Is our knowledge about words rooted in our perceptual and motor experiences, or have we abstracted away from contexts in which we learned the words in the first place?  I am particularly interested in the relationship between action and event comprehension and verb knowledge and, to date, have used computational (connectionist) modeling and behavioral studies of healthy and aphasic speakers to address these issues.  But while sensory-motor information may be a critical part of our conceptual knowledge, our ability to understand abstract relationships between things suggests that we can also see beyond superficial similarities.  To this end, I am beginning to investigate the neural bases of solving verbal and non-verbal analogies.

 

Adam J. Woods, PhD
E-mail: adwoods@mail.med.upenn.edu

Research Interests: My present research is aimed at understanding the cognitive and neural bases for the perception of causality. The ability to perceive cause and effect (i.e., perceive causality) is an almost unique characteristic of human intelligence and underlies many human-specific abilities. Deficits in perceptual causality may play a role in a variety of disorders following brain-damage. Furthermore, deficits in inferring and perceiving causality have been suggested to contribute to schizophrenia, autism, and obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders. My research uses cognitive, functional neuroimaging, and neuropsychological methods to understand the nature and neural correlates of perceptual causality for normal and abnormal human behavior. My prior research has investigated unilateral visual neglect, cortical and behavioral arousal, human navigation, and visual perception.

 

Tilbe Göksun, PHD
Email: tilbe@mail.med.upenn.edu

Research Interests: My research questions center on the relationship between event perception and language. By taking an interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic approach, I investigate the cognitive processes and neural structures related to comprehending causal events and spatial events and producing causal sentences and spatial language. I am particularly interested in studying different levels of representations (perceptual, neural, verbal, and gestural) of causal and spatial events in normal and brain damaged adults and focal brain injured children, using behavioral, neuroimaging, and lesion analysis techniques.

 

Graduate Students:
 
Anh Truong
Email: atruong@mail.med.upenn.edu

Research Interests: I double-majored in organic chemistry and neuroscience at Yale, and I am a combined degree MD-PhD student here at Penn. I am interested broadly in the biology of human behavior and in brain imaging methods. As a PhD candidate in Bioengineering and an Associate of the HHMI-NIBIB Interfaces Program, I plan to study white matter damage in stroke patients and general white matter variability associated with aging. To keep my humanity intact, I dabble in musical theater, soccer, and web design/development.
 

Visiting Scholars :

 

Ben van Buren
E-mail: vanb@sas.upenn.edu

Research Interests:I am an undergraduate at Penn majoring in cognitive science.  Recently, my focus has been on the cognitive mechanisms underlying human aesthetic sensibility.  My job is to run an experiment that studies the effects of neurodegenerative diseases on artistic production.
 
Staff:
 

Matt Lehet
Department of Neurology
E-mail: lehetm@mail.med.upenn.edu

Research Interests: I received a B.A. in Psychology from Reed College in 2008. I am currently working on research investigating how language affects spatial, causal, temporal, and metaphoric relationships.