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Welcome
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Publications
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Research
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In the News
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Join Us |
Links
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MouseTracker |
Lab Director
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Jon Freeman, Ph.D.
[Web] [Email]
[CV]
[Twitter]
Jon Freeman is Assistant
Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University
and director of the Social Cognitive & Neural Sciences Lab.
He received his Ph.D. from Tufts
University and was on the faculty at Dartmouth College before
coming to NYU in 2014.
He studies split-second
social perception—how we use facial cues to instantly categorize
other people into social groups (e.g., gender and race) and perceive
their personality traits and emotion. He treats social
perception as a fundamentally dynamic process, and is interested
in how basic visual perceptions can be shaped by
prior social knowledge, stereotypes, and other aspects of social
cognition. He uses a wide range of brain and behavior-based
techniques to study the interplay of visual and social processes
in rapid person judgment, including the roles of specific facial
cues, social context, and individual differences. He
additionally examines how the brain represents social categories and core
trait dimensions, and how initial
perceptions influence downstream behavior and real-world
outcomes.
He is also the developer of the data collection and analysis
software, MouseTracker. |
Lab Manager
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Michael Berkebile
[Email]
Michael Berkebile received his
BA in psychology from the University of California, San Diego in
2013. Afterwards, while working with Dr. Ralph-Axel Mueller on
measures of functional connectivity in Autism spectrum disorder,
he earned his MA in psychology, with a focus on cognitive
neuroscience at San Diego State University in 2016. He is now at
NYU, acting as joint lab manager for Dr. Jon Freeman and Dr.
David Amodio. Michael is interested in studying how the neural
networks that support reward and punishment processes function
in social contexts. He further wants to research how these
networks develop, and manifest differentially based on factors
like group membership, level of social anxiety, social power,
and economic scarcity. |
Post-doctoral Researchers
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DJ Lick, Ph.D.
[Web]
[Email] [CV]
DJ Lick
is a post-doctoral researcher working with Jon Freeman at
NYU. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA, where he
worked primarily with Kerri Johnson.
After mere seconds of exposure to
another person, perceivers express biases related to that
person's sex, gender, sexual orientation, and race. DJ is
interested in the social cognitive mechanisms underlying these
biases. Specifically, he examines how low-level features of the
target (e.g., facial appearance, body shape, body motion) and
higher-level features of the perceiver (e.g., identity threat,
perceptual experience) interactively shape prejudicial biases in
the early moments of person perception. He brings
interdisciplinary methods from the social, cognitive, and vision
sciences to bear on these questions in order to provide new
information about the deep roots of interpersonal prejudice.
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Ph.D. Students
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Ryan Stolier
[Web]
[Email] [CV]
[Twitter]
Ryan is a NYU doctoral student
broadly interested in how we represent social perceptions and
concepts. His research concerns how bottom-up perceptual (e.g.,
face perception) and top-down social factors (e.g., prejudice,
motivation) influence and structure these representations. He is
interested in understanding these processes at both
psychological and neural levels of analysis. His research
primarily applies implicit behavioral and fMRI pattern analysis
methods to these questions.
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Jeff Brooks
[Email]
Jeff Brooks received his BA in
Philosophy, with a minor in Cognitive & Brain Sciences, from Tufts University in 2012.
Afterward, he spent a
year as a research assistant at Duke University's Center for
Cognitive Neuroscience, and two years as a lab manager in
Kristen Lindquist's lab at The University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill. He is now a PhD student at New York University,
working with Jon Freeman. Jeff is interested in the neural
mechanisms that support the influence of conceptual knowledge
and top-down social processes on lower-level perceptual
experiences, particularly in the context of social
categorization and emotion. He is also broadly interested in
exploring the role of domain-general intrinsic brain networks in
social perception and evaluative processes. |
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Ben Stillerman
[Email]
Ben received his BS in
Cognitive Science from University of California, San Diego and
he began his PhD in Social Psychology at NYU in 2015, working
with Jon Freeman and Dave Amodio. He wants to know how people
categorize others and how someone's membership in various social
groups can influence perception of them. He is especially
interested in how implicit stereotypes and prejudice alter
lower-level visual perception and in finding interventions to
mitigate the effects of intergroup bias. |
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Ashley Unger
[Email]
Ashley is a PhD candidate in
the Social Psychology program at NYU working primarily with Jon
Freeman. Prior to joining the program, she completed a B.S. in
Psychology with a Neuroscience option at The Pennsylvania State
University (Penn State). Upon completion of her degree, she
spent 2 years working as a Lab Manager in the Cognitive
Neuroscience Lab at Temple University. Her work centers on the
visual perceptual system. She is particularly interested in our
ability to rapidly recognize, categorize and respond to others
through use of facial physiognomy. While her previous work has
focused on the neural circuitry and mechanisms underlying these
processes in adults, she plans to extend her line of research
into developmental populations. |
Ph.D. Student Affiliates
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Annie Hill
[Email]
Annie received her B.A. in
Psychology from Vassar College in 2012. She began her Ph.D. in
Social Psychology at NYU in 2014, working primarily with Dr.
David Amodio. Her research broadly concerns how psychological
processes entrench intergroup conflict. She is especially
interested in identifying prejudice regulation strategies for
intergroup contexts in which discrimination is socially
acceptable. |
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Alexa Hubbard
[Email]
Alexa is a PhD student in social
psychology working primarily with Yaacov Trope. She is
interested in mental simulation and self-regulation. She is
collaborating with the Freeman lab in looking at how
psychological distance can affect the process of choosing
between immediate versus delayed rewards. |
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Diego Reinero
[Email]
[CV]
Diego received a dual B.S. in
Psychology and Business from Skidmore College in 2012. He worked
as a research assistant in various labs; Paul Bloom's lab at
Yale University, Daniel Gilbert's lab at Harvard University, and
the Empathy and Relational Science Program at Massachusetts
General Hospital. He began his Ph.D. in Social Psychology at NYU
in 2015, working primarily with Jay Van Bavel. He is broadly
interested in empathy, morality, and intergroup cooperation. His
current research explores how group identification shapes neural
synchrony and cooperation among individuals, and the dynamic
processing of moral decisions. |
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Qi Xu
[Email]
Qi was born and raised in mainland
China. Qi received her B.S. in Applied psychology from Shanghai
Normal University in 2012. She began her PhD in Social
Psychology at NYU in 2014, working primarily with Patrick
Shrout. She is broadly interested in how people represent their
romantic relationship and how relationship representations
influence thoughts, feelings and behavior. Her work in the
Freeman lab uses mouse-tracking paradigms to study how people
allocate financial resources within different relationship
contexts. Additionally, she is interested in exploring how
relationship representations are reflected at the neural level. |
Masters Student Research Assistants
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Sarah Pinson
[Email]
Sarah received her MA in Clinical
Psychology from France, where she is from. She is particularly
interested in infants and children's mental health and
development, and has extensively explored the early treatment
for infants at high-risk for Autistic Spectrum in parent-infant
psychotherapy settings. At the Freeman lab, Sarah studies the
underlying social and neural components of interactions between
people, which she has previously studied from a clinical
perspective. She continues to expand her field of research in
areas related to decision making with studies involving
MouseTracker.
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Daniel Mocombe
[Email]
Daniel received his BA in
psychology from the University at Buffalo, and began his Masters
in psychology at NYU in 2014. He is working in the lab as a
research assistant and is interested in the underlying
mechanisms involved in facial perception and how they play a
role in categorizing individuals into different social groups.
He is also interested in implicit biases and stereotyping
behaviors and their influence on intergroup relations. In his
free time Daniel enjoys playing the guitar, cooking, and
traveling. |
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Carlina Conrad
[Email]
Carlina received her B.Sc. in
Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience at Jacobs University in
Bremen, Germany. She started her Masters in psychology at NYU in
2015 where she is working in the lab as a research assistant.
She is interested in the field of behavioral neuroscience,
specifically in the underlying neural mechanisms of the dynamic
relationship between social perception and group membership. In
regards to social perception, she is especially interested in
the bias and perception of emotion and trustworthiness. |
Undergraduate & Post-Bac Research Assistants
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Amir Hemmat
[Email]
Amir Hemmat graduated from Yeshiva
University, cum laude, with a degree in Marketing. Amir is
excited to learn as much as possible from the Freeman Lab as he
plans to pursue a higher degree in psychology. Amir is working
in the lab as an assistant and is currently interested in, as
Professor Freeman put it, "the personal and research" side of
the lab's work - especially through the lab's mouse-tracking
trials in understanding face perception. |
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Ying Xie
[Email]
Ying Xie is a psychology major
currently in her sophomore year at Hunter College. She is
interested in studying the neural circuits and biology involved
in visual perception. In her free time, she enjoys photography
and watching online lectures. She is also an avid mystery fan. |
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Shreyas Ganesh
[Email]
Shreyas Ganesh, also known by his
nickname Zakkir, is an undergraduate at NYU majoring in
psychology and neural science. His broad interests are in social
cognitive and affective neuroscience, which he would like to
research at the graduate level eventually. In particular, he
would like to take a multidisciplinary and multi-level approach
to researching how the development of societies, institutions
and schools of thought can be traced to neural processes. In his
free time, Zakkir is an avid lover of film and music. |
High School Students
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Rick Melucci
[Email]
Rick is a senior at Stuyvesant
High School. He is interested in neural science and computer
science and is currently studying the effects of abstract
features such as trustworthiness on facial recognition. In his
free time, he enjoys coding, playing the saxophone, and
producing music. |
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Lab Alumni
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Eric Hehman, Ph.D.
Post-docEric is now
an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Ryerson University.
Website:
http://www.erichehman.com
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Zach Ingbretsen
Lab ManagerZach graduated from Dartmouth
College in 2011 with an A.B. in neuroscience with honors. After
graduating, he was lab manager for Catherine Norris'
social neuroscience lab, and then lab
manager / research technician / software development assistant
extraordinaire in Jon Freeman's lab. He is currently a research
technician / software engineer in Mina Cikara's lab at Harvard. |
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Xi Shen
Masters Student
[Email]
Xi was a Masters student at NYU,
majoring in psychology. She worked in the lab as a research
assistant and is interested in face perception and its role in
social cognitive processes. She is currently a PhD student at
Cornell University. |
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Natalie Salmanowitz
Undergraduate Honors Student
Natalie Salmanowitz was a
neuroscience major and theater minor at Dartmouth from Menlo Park,
California, who graduated in 2014. She completed her senior
thesis project in the lab, exploring the neural basis of the
facial width to height ratio and its impact on predictions of
guilt. She is currently a Masters student at Duke. |
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Jemin Park
Undergraduate Research
Assistant
Jemin Park was a neuroscience major
at Dartmouth from Knoxville, Tennessee. He worked in the lab as
an undergraduate research assistant and is interested in
studying how the brain converts sensory information into
definite perceptions of people. |
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Jay Dumanian
Undergraduate Honors Student
Jay Dumanian was a psychology
major at Dartmouth from Los Altos, California, who graduated in
2014. He completed an honors thesis in the lab, studying the
effects of personality judgments on our mental representations
of the faces of others.
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Xuan Zhang
Lab Manager
Xuan Zhang received her A.B. in
Mathematics, cum laude, nutrition and health minor, from Cornell
University in 2014. She worked as an undergraduate research
assistant in the Laboratory of Rational Decision Making with Dr.
Reyna. She served as lab manager from 2014-2016 in the Freeman
Lab. She is now pursuing her Ph.D. at Columbia. |
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Carlotta Cogoni
Visiting Ph.D. StudentCarlotta Cogoni is enrolled in
a PhD program in Cognitive Neuroscience at SISSA, in Italy. Her
research focuses on sexual objectification with a specific focus
on the female gender. She was a visiting student in the Freeman Lab in Spring 2016, working on
a collaboration involving multi-voxel pattern
analyses (MVPA) for fMRI data, as well as computer
mouse-tracking techniques. |
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