University of California, Los Angeles, M.A.
Ecole Normale Superieure, M.A.
Emory University, B.A.
Box 951563, 1285 Franz Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563
Research Interest:
The social world is extremely complex. Whether keeping track of three friends' perspectives in a conversation, a roomful of colleagues' beliefs during a conference, or the political ideology of someone we just met, we constantly juggle social cognitive information. In my research, I examine the brain mechanisms supporting social working memory, or our ability to actively maintain and manipulate social cognitive information. The kinds of questions I ask are: how does the medial frontoparietal network implicated in social cognition and lateral frontoparietal parietal network implicated in cognitive working memory interact to support social working memory? Does social working memory capacity predict individual differences in social intelligence? Why does the 'default-mode network' disengage during non-social working memory, but engage during social cognition?
Other related research interests include: neural mechanisms supporting cognition about the self, close others, and strangers and how these influence various kinds of broader cognitive processes, such as empathy, episodic memory, and theory of mind.