 Catherine L. Reed |
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| Professor of Psychology and
Neuroscience Claremont McKenna College
850 Columbia Ave. FAX: 909-621-8419 |
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Research: Embodied Perception, Attention, Cognition & Emotion |
| Our ability to recognize people we know, understand the intent of their actions, learn new skills, and interact successfully with the environment relies on our ability to quickly and accurately understand the body positions of others relative to the current positions of our own bodies. Making accurate interpretations of others’ actions and emotions and then understanding them within the context of one’s own bodily state is difficult task in a constantly changing world. However, creating mappings between the self and other is an essential component both for successful responses to environmental events and for successful interaction in the social world. |
| The goal of my research is to
understand the role that the body
plays in directing our perception and cognition to the actions of
ourselves and others. To develop a unified
understanding of how we represent the human body and its actions,
I and members of my lab
examine the relation between brain function and action using the tools
of cognitive psychology, cognitive neuropsychology, and functional
neuroimaging (fMRI, MEG). These studies
address how we perceive the body postures of ourselves and others,
whether the human body is “special” in its recognition and brain
representation, how body position and direction influence attention to
specific regions of space, how our actions and experiences affect object
recognition and emotional processing, and whether the somatosensory
system has modality specific object recognition and spatial localization
pathways separate from the visual system’s.
Please see my Cognitive Neuroscience Lab page for a more complete description. |