My current research interests can be divided into two major themes. The first theme is social perception, a term I use to describe the privileged processing of cues for social behavior such as faces, biological motion, and animacy. In particular, I am interested in the inferences an observer makes about an individual's intentions and goals from biological motion cues.

The second theme concerns the interplay between brain systems for executive processing and brain systems for emotional regulation. I have been particularly interested in the mechanism by which task irrelevant emotional stimuli can commandeer attention.

For both themes, my laboratory uses a multi-modal approach that has included functional and structural MRI, intracranial electrophysiology in patients with subdural electrodes, direct cortical stimulation, scalp-recorded event-related potentials, eye tracking, and behavior.

My long form curriculum vita and complete publication list can be found here.
Recent papers and links are listed here.

I completed my Ph.D. in Biological Psychology in 1980 at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana under Professors Emanuel Donchin, Michael G.H. Coles, William Greenough, and Charles Eriksen. My thesis concerned the manner in which electrophysiological recordings could complement the measurement of reaction time in simple decision tasks by providing information about the timing of component mental and neural processes.

Following the completion of my degree, I moved to Yale University and the West Haven VA Medical Center to work at the Neuropsychology Laboratory with Truett Allison, Bill Goff, Terry Darcey and Charles C. Wood on a broad range of electrophysiological studies in both animals and humans. It was with Truett Allison and a wonderful group of post-doctoral and graduate students including Shlomo Bentin, Anna Nobre, Ken Paller, Aina Puce, and Aysenil Belger that I explored human brain systems involved in face and letterstring processing, language processing, decision-making, memory, and basic sensory and motor processing.

I joined the faculty in the Department of Neurosurgery at Yale and began a long and productive association with Dr. Dennis Spencer, its chair, and the Yale Epilepsy Surgery Program. With Spencer, I started exploring the structural changes that occurred in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy with a focus on the hippocampus. These studies involved making quantitative measurements with MRI, which at the time was a relatively new technique that we had adopted for the placement of intracranial electrodes. The structural MRI work led to some interesting observations of hippocampal atrophy in epilepsy, and to the relationship of atrophy to memory deficits in epilepsy. Doug Bremner, a psychiatrist working with the support of a VA Career Development award and Tammy Scott, a Yale graduate student working in my lab, began to apply these same techniques to patients with PTSD and found both memory deficits and hippocampal atrophy in this population.

These studies stimulated my interest in MRI and in 1992 I joined on-going studies in Robert Shulman's lab at Yale that resulted in several of the earliest functional MRI studies, including the first that explicitly manipulated cognitive processes. An exciting and productive period ensued in which my group worked with many collaborators including John Gore and Todd Constable to investigate sensory and motor processes, language, motion, and working memory with fMRI. One area of particular interest in our group was face processing, in which our initial observations of face specific regions in the fusiform gyrus defined by electrical recording and stimulation in humans was quickly followed by the first fMRI studies of face processing that we published in 1995.

In 1998 I accepted an offer from Duke University to become the founding director of the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center (BIAC). At Duke I was very fortunate to work with outstanding colleagues such as Allen Song, and to have an outstanding series of post-docs, K-award trainees, and graduate students including Scott Huettel, Kevin Pelphrey, Eiji Kirino, Hiroshi Yamasaki, Lihong Wang, Sean Hinton, Raj Morey, Michele Diaz, Florin Dolcos, and James Morris. At the BIAC, I was able to expand my interests in social perception, and to more fully develop a nascent line of research that I had begun at Yale on social perception and biological motion, which remains a significant aspect of my current research. I was also able to develop a new line of research on the interplay of emotion regulation and executive processing, which had grown from earlier studies at Yale on working memory and executive processing that I had done in collaboration with Patricia Goldman-Rakic.

This latter series of studies also led me into a clinical line of research in depression and PTSD. In 2003, I became the founding director of the Veterans Administration's VISN6 Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center (MIRECC), which focused upon genetic, neuroimaging, neuropsychological, and intervention studies of mental disorders that followed deployment of soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan. My own research within the MIRECC has focused upon imaging genetics in PTSD, and has been conducted in collaboration with Raj Morey, Chris Marx, and Jean Beckham.

In 2007, I returned to Yale as Professor in the Department of Psychology. After nearly a decade away from New Haven, I am extraordinarily pleased to be back. My new laboratory is focused upon social perception, emotional regulation, and cognitive control. In addition, I have maintained many of the collaborations that I established at the Duke and at the VA, and continue a formal relationship with the imaging-genetics study at the VISN6 MIRECC.