Research

Research in the lab combines behavioral and brain imaging approaches with an emphasis on reasonably naturalistic stimuli and contexts (e.g., movies, stories, virtual reality and natural scenes) to gain access to how individuals think and feel about the people and temptations that surround them.

Social Perception

Research in the lab focuses on the cognitive and neural representation of other people’s personality and mental states. This work is aimed at understanding how our knowledge of other people (their likes and dislikes, their personalities, their quirks and habits) is organized into a coherent impression and, in turn, how this impression is encoded in the brain.

Self Regulation Failure

Another line of research in his laboratory involves understanding the role of motivation, self-control and desire in precipitating self-regulation failures. Using a combination of eye-tracking, functional neuroimaging and measures of structural and functional brain connectivity, this work examines how individual differences in the ability to regulate desire for appetitive stimuli (food, cigarettes, alcohol) can be used to predict real-world self control failures.