Reed Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

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Contact Information:

  Dr. Catherine Reed

  Dept of Psychology

  Claremont McKenna

  850 Columbia Ave.

  Claremont, CA    91711

  clreed@cmc.edu

  (909) 607-0740

 

Selected Publications

 

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   In this lab study we study embodied attention, cognition, and emotion.  We use the tools
   of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and functional neuroimaging (EEG/ERP) to
   investigate the role that the body plays in directing our perception, attention, object
   recognition, emotional processing, and financial decision making. 
 
   In addition to studying young adults, we also study special populations including autistic,
   older, and disabled adults.
 
   Contact us to learn more about this research and/or about how to join the lab.

  • Lab members must devote a minimum of 2 hrs per week to the lab, pass the NIH ethics course, & be willing to gain expertise on all lab projects.

  • Psychology and Neuroscience Thesis students must have cognitive neuroscience lab experience prior to senior year as well as Research Methods and Statistics courses.  Year-long thesis project must be confirmed with Dr. Reed during Spring Semester Junior year.

  • Lab Members

         Find out what people do & where they go after being in the lab!

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Contributions of Configural Processing & Expertise to Body Perception. Because humans are social animals, it is important that we be able to recognize others’ identities, facial expressions, and body postures.  It is only recently that psychologists have recognized the contributions of the body and its postures to basic visual processing.  We determine  the extent to which configural processing mechanisms are used to recognize body postures and how it is influenced by physical and visual expertise.

Contributions of Body Placement & Orientation to Spatial Attention. Important stimuli in our environment demand immediate attention and physical responses. Recently we have shown that one’s own body position influences attention as well as the bodies and actions of others.  Hand position can facilitate the detection of targets in visual space.  Also, trunk orientation can bias the shifting of attention. We are currently conducting behavioral and EEG studies to determine the neural substrates of embodied attention processes.

Bodily Contributions to the Encoding and Decoding of Emotions.  We investigate emotions that are communicated by touch and posture or body movement, as well as by faces. This work approaches emotional communication from a social-functional perspective and determines whether the means of expressing specific emotions can influence the effectiveness of emotional communication and whether different emotions are expressed differently depending on the person or people to whom it is being communicated.

'What', 'Where', and 'How' Systems in Somatosensory & Multimodal Object Processing.  We investigate the functional organization of object recognition, spatial localization, and action planning in the brain.  Specifically we want to understand and document dedicated neural pathways in the somatosensory system for tactile object recognition and spatial perception.  Analogous pathways in the visual system have been called "what" and "where" pathways. We also examine how information about objects gleaned from touch and vision is integrated in the brain and whether this information integration changes with aging.  We use functional neuroimaging techniques (fMRI and MEG) as well as behavioral techniques to study these issues.