Principal Investigator Rebecca Saxe
General research efforts have been directed at understanding the types of cognitive operations that humans engage in when otherwise not focused on the external world and the brain systems that support these operations. My specific research efforts in the Saxelab involve assessing the anatomical and functional overlap, or lack thereof, of two such cognitive operations: episodic memory retrieval and Theory of Mind. By manipulating the type of mnemonic and Theory of Mind-related information associated with the stimuli, we are able to determine that these two systems, although normally juxtaposed, can interact in adaptive ways during decision-making.