Guest Participants

Our research focuses on how children acquire knowledge rapidly and accurately with limited amounts of evidence. I have done extensive research on early language development (word learning in particular) and infant cognition (e.g., object concept, kind concepts, number representations, probabilistic reasoning, physical and psychological reasoning), and social cognition (e.g., preferences, intentionality). We are interested in inductive learning from statistical information in infants and children.

In the Fox lab, we want to understand the neurobiology of “affective style”. We want to understand why some people are afraid to leave the house, while others enjoy the feeling of danger. We want to understand why some people callously abuse, while others become overwhelmed with empathy. We hope that understanding the biology of affective style will lead us to a better understand humanity and help people make choices about who they want to be.

Much of our research aims to understand the biology that underlies dispositional anxiety. This kind of understanding could allow for specific interventions to ameliorate anxiety disorders and reduce the suffering of anxious individuals. To do this, we use varied tools to study humans and nonhuman primates, including: high-throughput computing, neuroimaging, RNA-sequencing, cellphone-based experience sampling, and designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs.

Aubrey Kelly received her PhD in Biology and Neuroscience from Indiana University in 2014, and was a NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University from 2014-2018. She joined the faculty in the Department of Psychology at Emory University in 2018. Research in the Kelly lab combines conceptual and empirical tools from comparative neuroanatomy, developmental psychology, behavioral ecology, and molecular neuroscience to understand the proximate and ultimate causes of social behavior. A unifying theme in the lab’s research is to examine plasticity in the neural mechanisms of social behavior and question how neuroplasticity can allow for phenotypic changes on different timescales (i.e. rapid, developmental, and evolutionary). Using multiple social species from diverse phylogenetic taxa, the lab seeks to identify mechanisms that are fundamental for the promotion of sociality across taxa.

Dr. Bachevalier is Chief and Core Scientist in the Division of Developmental and Cognitive Neuroscience at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology at Emory University. Dr. Bachevalier’s research group conducts developmental behavioral studies on the neural substrates underlying the development of learning and memory functions and the regulation of socioemotional behaviors in nonhuman primates. One aspect of this research involves working to determine the structural or functional brain immaturity underlying the development of episodic memory processes in primates and trace the effects of early insult to structures within the medial temporal lobe. An important facet of the research program has been to relate basic research findings in nonhuman primates to normal human behavior and neuropsychiatric disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia.

Our lab works on theoretical neuroscience, with the fundamental goal of understanding how networks of neurons and synapses cooperate across multiple scales of space and time to mediate important brain functions, like sensory perception, motor control, and memory. To achieve this goal, we employ and extend tools from disciplines like statistical mechanics, dynamical systems theory, machine learning, information theory, control theory, and high-dimensional statistics, as well as collaborate with experimental neuroscience laboratories collecting physiological data from a range of model organisms. Some topics of interest include: how birds learn to sing, spatial memory in the rodent hippocampus, attention and motor control in macaques, memory properties of complex synapses, dynamics of plasticity in recurrent networks, signal propagation in neural circuits, the emergence of categorization in multi-layered networks, and the statistical mechanics of high dimensional data analysis.

Dr. D’Esposito earned his medical degree in 1987 at the SUNY Health Science Center at Syracuse and completed clinical training in Neurology at Boston University Medical Center in 1991. After residency training, he was awarded a NIH Javits Fellowship to pursue research training at the Memory Disorders Research Center at Boston University and Braintree Rehabilitation Hospital. In 1993, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he later became Chief of the Cognitive Neurology Division. In 2000, he was recruited to the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley to become Professor of Neuroscience, and the Director of the newly created Henry H. Wheeler, Jr. Brain Imaging Center. He also practices Neurology at the Northern California VA Medical Center. Dr. D’Esposito’s research investigates the neural mechanisms underlying cognition, how the brain recovers from injury and potential treatments for the injured brain. He has over 375 research publications, written and edited six books, and received numerous competitive NIH research grants. He has trained over 75 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows and received many clinical and academic awards. He is currently the Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.