PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Sharon L. Thompson Schill
Davidson College; B.A. in Psychology
Stanford University; Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology
Research Interests: I am interested in many aspects of human cognition (see blurbs below!), but recurring themes include the role of the frontal lobes in the regulation of thought, and the link between perceptual and memory systems.
Research in progress: One major theme in the lab right now is an effort to understand the costs, as well as the benefits, of frontally-mediated cognitive control. Our current ideas about this are summarized in Chrysikou et al., 2014, Neuropsychologia. A second major theme concerns how conceptual information is dynamically retrieved and reconfigured; this work includes studies of how visual features are integrated into concepts (e.g., Coutanche & Thompson-Schill, Cerebral Cortex), how new conceptual information is integrated with prior knowledge (e.g., Coutanche & Thompson-Schill, JEP:General), and how different variables affect how we retrieve conceptual information (e.g., Hsu et al., J of Cog Neuro).
Email: sschill@psych.upenn.edu
POST-DOCTORAL FELLOWS
Alexa Tompary
University of Chicago; B.A. Psychology, 2010
New York University; Ph.D. Psychology, 2017
Research Interests: I’m interested in the how episodic memories are altered with consolidation, and how this process is related to the acquisition of semantic and conceptual knowledge. As a graduate student, I used behavioral and neuroimaging methods to examine how episodic memories with overlapping information come to be represented over time.
Email: atompary@sas.upenn.edu| Website »
Cybelle Smith
Stanford University; B.A. Linguistics, 2011
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; M.S. Applied Statistics, 2018, Ph.D. Psychology, 2018
Research Interests: I am interested in the role of executive function in accessing, maintaining and manipulating semantic memories in the processing of both verbal and non-verbal input streams. For example, predictive processing may play a role in our ability to understand rapid linguistic input. Prediction may also contribute to our ability to rapidly identify objects and recall relevant information about them as we move through the visual world. However, open questions remain regarding the extent to which predictive processing in the verbal and non-verbal domains relies on shared neural and cognitive mechanisms, and the extent to which differences across domains can be explained by general principles of neural organization. Similar questions arise in comparing working memory function and the broader class of contextual facilitation effects across the verbal and non-verbal domains.
Email: cybelle@sas.upenn.edu
GRADUATE STUDENTS
Tima Zeng
Wesleyan University; B.A. Psychology & Computer Science, 2017
Research Interests: I have a broad interest in long-term memory.
Email: hzen@sas.upenn.edu
Aura A. L. Cruz Heredia
University of California, Los Angeles; B.A. Psychobiology & Linguistics, 2018
Research Interests: I’m interested in questions nestled at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and language science, primarily in understanding the language-memory interface using electrophysiological and neuroimaging methods.
Email: aurach@sas.upenn.edu
RESEARCH SPECIALISTS
Abby Clements
Swarthmore College; B.A. Neuroscience & Linguistics, 2020
Email: abbyclem@sas.upenn.edu
Nina Peleg
University of Oxford; B.A. Experimental Psychology, 2021
Email: npeleg@sas.upenn.edu
Frida M. Galaviz Huerta
New York University; B.A. Psychology, 2022