Reed

Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

(Brain images change when cursor is placed on them) 

Contact Information:

  Dr. Catherine Reed

  Dept of Psychology

  Claremont McKenna

  850 Columbia Ave.

  Claremont, CA 91711

  cathy.reed@cmc.edu

  (909) 607-0740

  Selected Publications

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Contributions of Configural Processing & Expertise to Body Perception. Because humans are social, it is important that we be able to recognize others’ identities, facial expressions, and body postures.  Although psychologists have conducted considerable research on object recognition processes dedicated to face processing, it is only recently that psychologists are recognizing the importance of the body and its postures.  In our lab we are conducting behavioral, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging research to determine to what extent the visual object processing mechanisms used to recognize faces are also used to recognize body postures. Specifically, we are investigating the extent to which the same configural processing mechanisms are used for faces as body postures and the extent to which configural processing is influenced by both physical and visual expertise.

Contributions of Body Placement & Orientation to Spatial Attention. Traditionally, spatial attention has been viewed as a purely cognitive faculty that is influenced primarily by the location of objects within the visual environment.  Nonetheless, people are beginning to recognize that cognition and perception are embodied, that is, intimately connected with our bodies and how we use them.  Because important stimuli in our environment demand immediate physical responses, we must think of attention as being embodied too.  Recently we have shown that one’s own body position influences the direction of attention.  Hand position can facilitate the detection of targets in visual space in neurologically intact individuals.  Further, we have shown that trunk orientation can bias the shifting of attention. In some of our studies we emphasize that our own bodies play an important role in spatial attention.  In other studies we address how other people’s bodies direct spatial attention. The actions of other humans may have special social significance because they provide important sources of information about other’s intentions, emotional states, and future actions.  They may also provide cues to the locations of subsequent events and the appropriate reaction.

Bodily Contributions to the Encoding and Decoding of Emotions.  The study of emotions has been primarily focused on those emotions that can be unambiguously communicated via facial expressions. However, this facial focus has limited the scope of the emotions studied. Our recent work has begun to 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 are interested in 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.