Social Cognitive & Neural Sciences Lab

MouseTracker has hit a user base of 3,000 registered researchers! I'm having nostalgia now to coding that nasty thing in grad school. As Softpedia once so aptly put it, "...the application is a powerful research tool and targeting those with a serious interest in cognitive study, although it [may not be] especially pretty to look at." Thanks for everyone's interest in using it and getting down with real-time cognitive dynamics!

Poster presenting like a boss

selfie. NY area social neuroscientists looking good. Break the internet. Thanks to Society for Personality and Social Psychology for funding!

Freeman Lab representing at the NY Social & Affective Neuroscience conference

Our new work out this week in Nature Neuroscience: Using neural decoding approaches with mouse-tracking, we find evidence suggesting that stereotypes can influence the basic way we 'see' a face's gender, race, and emotion. This was theoretically predicted from our computational model but neural evidence had been lacking. Read the paper (http://go.nature.com/JqzdjZ) or check out some coverage in the Washington Post (http://wapo.st/1Xenj7u). By better understanding the mechanisms underlying such 'visual stereotyping', the hope is that researchers can better develop interventions to reduce or eliminate unintended biases.

Grad students at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts created a multi-sensory art exhibit to convey some of our work on social perception and the amygdala to more general audiences. Pretty cool!

Drs. Jon Freeman and David Amodio are seeking a full-time lab manager and research technician to start in August or September 2016 for a two-year commitment. The position will be split half-time between Jon Freeman’s Social Cognitive & Neural Sciences Lab (http://psych.nyu.edu/freemanlab) and David Amodio’s Social Neuroscience Lab (http://www.amodiolab.org), located adjacently in the NYU Department of Psychology.

The Freeman lab studies mechanisms of split-second social perception, including topics such as social categorization and stereotyping, face processing and trait attribution, and the interplay of social cognition and visual perception. The Amodio lab studies the neural and psychological mechanisms of social cognition and self-regulation, particularly as they relate to social perception, intergroup bias, and behavior. Both labs use a variety of methods, including behavioral paradigms, neuroimaging, electrophysiology, and computational modeling.

The lab manager will work closely with Drs. Freeman and Amodio, and their respective lab groups, to coordinate and conduct research studies using a combination of behavioral and neural methods. He/she will also manage laboratory activities, such as planning research events and meetings, maintaining laboratory computers and equipment, maintaining lab websites, interviewing and supervising research assistants, managing grants, preparing stimuli, programming experimental tasks, processing and analyzing data, reviewing literature, and editing manuscripts. The lab manager will also have the opportunity to participate in the broader intellectual community in the NYU Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science.

The position is designed for an individual with a Bachelor's degree in psychology, neuroscience, computer science, cognitive science, or related fields. Strong technical skills are preferred, including competence in programming environments such as MATLAB, Python, and/or Javascript. Additional experience with fMRI data analysis packages (e.g., AFNI, SPM, BrainVoyager, FSL) is also helpful but not required. Previous experience conducting research in psychology/neuroscience is also desirable. More generally, we seek a candidate who is self-motivated, highly organized, and a good team player and who, ideally, seeks to eventually pursue a career in psychology/neuroscience.

The ideal candidate will make creative contributions to the labs’ research programs and, as such, have opportunities to co-author manuscripts resulting from the research. He/she will also have opportunities to help with the continued development of a data collection and analysis software package being used by the larger research community (http://www.mousetracker.org), and thus from time to time interact with and provide support to this community.

We will review applications beginning March 1, until the position is filled. Applicants should submit a resume/CV and a 1-page cover letter describing their qualifications for the position, relevant experience, and research/career interests, along with the names of 2-3 references that may be contacted for a recommendation. Please address applications to both Jon Freeman ([email protected]) and David Amodio ([email protected]).

Our research shows that your perception of other people's race is impacted by the visual environment you encounter them in, a process that may involve the orbitofrontal cortex

The Neural Basis of Contextual Influences on Face Categorization | Cerebral Cortex From only brief exposure to a face, individuals spontaneously categorize another's race. Recent behavioral evidence suggests that visual context may affect such categorizations. We used fMRI to examine the neural basis of contextual influences on the

Best gift ever! This weekend the lab is saying goodbye to 3 awesome years of Eric Hehman at both Dartmouth and NYU, who's off to take a professorship of his own in Toronto. Lots of memories...

Our latest research in the news! You can change how trustworthy you look, but competence is in your bones
(w/ Eric Hehman, Jessica Kay Flake, & Jon Freeman)

Your Facial Bone Structure Has a Big Influence on How People See You New research shows that although we perceive character traits like trustworthiness based on a person’s facial expressions, our perceptions of abilities like strength are influenced by facial structure

Our new findings to appear in PSPB show that the trustworthiness conveyed by a specific photo of one's face is surprisingly malleable while the ability conveyed is much more fixed due to muscle vs. skeletal cues, and this discrepancy has important implications for behavior (e.g., who gets chosen as a financial advisor). Just some thoughts next time you are choosing your profile photo or Linkedin headshot. | http://bit.ly/1eoyaJe