I am interested in the brain basis of social behavior in humans. I use the lesion method to study how people form social judgments, and I am also investigating the ways in which emotion can influence other cognitive processes, such as decision-making and memory. This research attempts to understand how people learn social information in the real world, and ultimately how this learning helps guide future behavior. This is important because it gives us a better understanding of how healthy brains function during social behavior and decision-making, and also how unhealthy/dysfunctional brains (e.g., injured brains or brains with a disease/disorder like autism) malfunction in the real world, thus providing us with insight into how to rehabilitate social behavior in these patients. 

Recent publications