Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

In my lab, we study how people use sensory information to perceive their world and move about in it. We are also interested in how they hold information about objects and people in memory, and form mental images. We study how these kinds of abilities change throughout life, and how they might be affected by special training in things like sports or music, or by brain injuries or problems affecting brain development. The work I have planned for the next 5 years will involve 2 PhD students, 3 MA students, and several undergraduates. Some of the work will examine how our bodies respond when we look at people and objects. When we see someone make a facial expression parts of our brains that are activated when we make the same facial expression ourselves show increased activity. The autonomic nervous system, which controls things like our heart rate and breathing, reacts. Even the motor system responds-so, we tend to mimic other people's facial expressions automatically as we watch them unfold. We are interested in studying how information about these different responses to what we see are used help us to figure out how the people we are watching might be feeling, and whether their feelings are about to change or not. We are also interested in what happens when people look at objects. We respond differently to some objects than others. For example, when we look at tools there is increased activity in parts of the brain that are involved in actually using those tools. We want to know how properties of objects affect our ability to think about them (e.g., to imagine what they would look like from another angle), and to pay attention to other things that are happening around us. We are also interested in how special training can change how we process and react to certain kinds of sensory information. Some research suggests that training in sports like swimming changes how we process cues about how our own bodies move. We want to see if it might also affect how athletes process and interpret the movements of other people. Finally, the work that we have planned will help us discover more about factors that contribute to individual differences in perceptual and cognitive abilities. We want to understand why some people seem either overly-sensitive or insensitive to certain kinds of sensory information, and whether this affects how they make sense of their own feelings, and of the world around them. Learning more about this may help to explain some contradictory findings and shed new light on many phenomena. It may also help us to design better studies in the future. The basic research we will carry out will contribute to current theories about how our brains and bodies work together to help us to make sense of the world around us. Ultimately, this kind of basic research may have important implications for understanding and treating conditions characterized by perceptual and social difficulties, such as autism spectrum disorders.