My research in cognitive neuroscience focuses on issues of social relationships, empathy, self, action perception and creativity. I use functional neuroimaging combined with behavioral studies of normal and clinical populations to examine the neural mechanisms that underlie our experience of resonating with other people and being aware of our selves.
I am currently Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California, in the Brain and Creativity Institute and the Department of Psychology.
Mirror Neurons and Empathy
Mirror neurons are neurons that become active when you perform an action and when you see someone else perform an action. We have recently found that some of these mirror neurons, in the right inferior frontal gyrus, are sensitive to a background context that implies an intention on the part of the actor. These neurons may be important for determining the intention or meaning of an action. Interestingly, we found that people who describe themselves as more empathic people show greater activity in this region when watching actions in context. Empathy may rely in part on neural systems that allow us to resonate with someone else's actions, to simulate what they are doing as we watch.
Neural basis of self recognition
This project uses fMRI to investigate the neural mechanisms of self recognition. In a study headed by Lucina Uddin, we have found a network of mostly right-hemisphere brain regions that respond more to one's own face than to a friend's face [download pdf]. Many of these regions are the same that contain mirror neurons; we may "resonate" with ourselves more effectively than with any other individual. More recently we sought to extend these results by looking not only at face recognition, but voice recognition as well. Brain regions that respond to the self regardless of sensory modality may be involved in an abstract representation of the self. We found that the right prefrontal cortext responds preferentially to one's own voice as well as one's own face [download poster]. This region may play in a role in cross-modal self representation.
Politics and the Brain
Group membership is an important aspect of self concept. We studied 10 democrats and 10 republicans with fMRI while they looked at pictures of the presidential candidates and political advertisements in order to understand the brain processes that underlie political attitudes and group identity [download pdf]. We found that viewing pictures of an opponent candidate activated cognitive control networks as well as brain regions that process negative emotions. Preliminary results were covered by the New York Times, and a more recent press report can be found in the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Multisensory action recognition
The perception of action is not restricted to the visual modality. In this fMRI experiment, participants saw an action, heard an action, or saw and heard an action. The goal with this research is to understand how actions are recognized by the two senses, how sensory information about actions is integrated, and to find "abstract" action representations that are not sensory-specific. We have found a region of the left ventral premotor cortex that seems to respond to the conjunction of sight and sound, only for action-related stimuli [download poster].
Creative insight and the brain
This experiment was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh. The goal is to understand what happens in the brain during the moment of creative insight, the so-called "aha" moment. Participants in this experiment solve difficult anagrams and indicate whether the answer just "popped" into their heads, or if they consciously deliberated to come up with the answer. Our data suggest that creative insight may require activation of both cerebral hemispheres simultaneously [download poster].
Mindful Awareness
Many of my research interests can be related to mindful awareness. The Mindful Awareness Research Center is dedicated to investigating, evaluating and disseminating Mindful Awareness – the moment-by-moment process of actively observing and drawing inferences from one’s physical, mental and emotional experiences.