The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Rebecca Saxe, Ph.D., professor, department of brain and cognitive sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Speaker bio(s)

Perhaps one of the most surprising discoveries of functional neuroimaging in humans was that a group of cortical regions, including bilateral temporal parietal junction (right and left TPJ) and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), show selective activity while participants are thinking about other people’s thoughts. The last decade has produced extensive evidence concerning when, how much, and how selectively these regions are recruited when thinking about other minds. By contrast, almost nothing is known about the representations and computations supported by the populations of neurons in these regions. Dr. Saxe will describe some new directions of research in her laboratory aimed at characterizing the content and format of abstract, behaviorally relevant features of mental state inferences. These results suggest that these cortical regions contain precise and distributed representations of epistemic and emotional features of other people’s mental states, and that these features are at least partially represented in continuous, abstract feature spaces.

 

Dr. Saxe is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research addresses the human brain's astonishing capacity for complex abstract thought. She is especially known for her work on "Theory of Mind,” the ability to think about the thoughts, beliefs, plans, hopes, and emotions of other people. Central questions in this research include: How does an adult’s brain construct thoughts about thoughts? How do these capacities develop in infancy and childhood? How is this aspect of brain development affected by the environment and/or by neurodevelopment disorders? And how do these capacities affect social cognition, especially in the context of inter-group conflict? Dr. Saxe has authored over 70 articles and is proud to have mentored more than a dozen talented graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. 

 

Dr. Saxe received her B.A. from the University of Oxford and her Ph.D. from MIT. Before joining MIT’s faculty in 2006, she was a junior fellow of Harvard University's Society of Fellows. She is the recipient of several honors, including the 2008 Young Investigator Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the 2009 Robert L. Fantz Award for Young Psychologists from the American Psychological Foundation, and the 2014 Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences. Her teaching has also been recognized with numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Smith Award for dedication to student life and learning from MIT. She was named one of Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10” in 2008, and her 2009 TED talk has been watched 2.5 million times.

Open to

Public

Host

Winrich Freiwald, Ph.D.

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Linda Hanssler

Phone

(212) 327-7714

Sponsor

Linda Hanssler
(212) 327-7714
lhanssler@rockefeller.edu

Readings

http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=4166