Faculty
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ProfessorHead of DepartmentMy research focuses on various aspects of cognitive development in human infants. Specifically, I study infants' visual processing from the level of spatial attention and eye-movement control through the intermediate levels of object and face perception to the level of interpretation of observed actions in terms of goals and understanding of communicative signals. I am also interested in how cognitive processes are accomplished by the human brain and how cognitive development can be explained by the neural development in infancy. Beyond behavioral measures, I use high-density event-related potentials and near-infrared spectoscropy (optical imaging) to measure the on-line functioning of the brain while infants are engaged in various activities.
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Associate ProfessorMy research focuses on how structured visual information is acquired and converted into sophisticated internal representations for controlling cognition and behavior. We use an integrated approach with three main components: human psychophysical and learning experiments, computational modeling of perception and learning, and multi-electrode recording from behaving animals. The recurrent theme of our work is the pursuit of a statistically based and biologically sound framework to link low-level visual processes and mechanisms (e.g., orientation coding and adaptation) with the development and learning of higher level complex features and constancies for efficient representations of objects and scenes of the visual environment. For more information visit: http://www.bio.brandeis.edu/fiserLab/index.html
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ProfessorCo-Director of the Cognitive Development Center (CDC)György Gergely has done his graduate studies in psychology at University College London and Columbia University where he received his PhD in experimental psycholinguistics. He has also earned a second PhD in Clinical Child Psychology from the HIETE University, Budapest. His main research interests are: Social and cognitive development and cultural learning in infancy and early childhood, action understanding, theory of mind, and developmental psychopathology. He has published books and papers in three broad areas of research and theory: a) cognitive science, b) cognitive and socio-emotional development, and c) clinical and psychoanalytic developmental theory, and developmental psychopathology.
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Assistant ProfessorChristophe Heintz is working on cultural evolution and cognition in the domains of the history of science and behavioural economics.
He studied mathematics and philosophy at the universities of Paris (Sorbonne and Diderot) and Cambridge. He worked for his Ph.D. at the Institut Jean Nicod, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Before coming to CEU, he was a research fellow at the KLI for Evolution and Cognition Research in Vienna. -
ProfessorGünther received his PhD in Cognitive Science from Hamburg University in 1997. After a one-year stay at the University of Illinois at Chicago he became a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Wolfgang Prinz’s group in Munich. From 2004 to 2007 he was Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Rutgers University (US). Between 2007 and 2011 he held Chairs for Social Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology at the Psychology Department of Birmingham University (UK) and the Donders Centre for Cognition at Radboud University Nijmegen (NL). His diverse research interests include social perception, joint action, motor control, experience of agency, and problem solving. For more information on my research go to http://somby.hu
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Associate Research FellowI completed my undergraduate studies in Psychology at the Babes-Bolyai University Cluj Napoca, Romania in 2000, followed by an MA degree from the same university in 2002. In 2008 May i have received a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience, from SISSA, Trieste, Italy (Advisor Prof. Jacques Mehler). From 2007 till 2010 I was a Marie Curie research fellow in the DISCOS project at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest and a research fellow at the CEU Cognitive Development Centre. Currently I am a research fellow at the CEU Cognitive Development Centre.
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Associate ProfessorNatalie studied psychology and psycholinguistics in Innsbruck, Austria, and then joined the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich in 2001. Having received her PhD from LMU Munich in 2004 she spent the following years working as a post-doc and later as an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, NJ, and as a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK. In 2008, Natalie was appointed as an Associate Professor at the Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen, and started a five year project on the "Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms of Joint Action" (funded by a EURYI grant from the European Science Foundation). She is interested in how perception, action, and cognition contribute to social interaction in humans and other animals. For more information on my research go to http://somby.hu
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Part-Time ProfessorDan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist. He is the author numerous articles in anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and psychology and of three books: Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge UP 1975), On Anthropological Knowledge (Cambridge UP 1985), and Explaining Culture (Blackwell 1996). In these three books, He has developed a naturalistic approach to culture under the name of ‘epidemiology of representations’. Dan Sperber is also the co-author, with Deirdre Wilson (Department of Linguistics, University College, London) of Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Blackwell 1986 – Second Revised Edition, 1995) and of Relevance and meaning (Cambridge UP, forthcoming). Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson have developed a cognitive approach to communication known as ‘Relevance Theory’. Both the epidemiology of representations and relevance theory have been influential and also controversial.
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Research FellowI am a linguist. My research is on language and cognition. I obtained my PhD in Linguistics from the Theoretical Linguistics Program, Eötvös Loránd University in 2005. I have published on categories, mainly case, aspect, modality, evidentiality, negation, and verb classes. My recent research focuses on evidentiality and generics.
Visiting faculty
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Visiting ProfessorI am a French philosopher of mind and the cognitive sciences. I am a member and former director of Institut Jean Nicod in Paris. I am currently working on issues raised by the developmental investigation of children’s ability to ascribe psychological states in order to make sense of others’ instrumental and communicative actions.
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Associate ProfessorMy research focuses on learning and memory from computational, algorithmic/representational and neurobiological viewpoints. I also maintain an active interest in the possible computational functions of neural oscillations, particularly those present in the hippocampus and neocortex. Computationally and algorithmically, my group uses ideas from Bayesian approaches to statistical inference and reinforcement learning to characterize the goals and mechanisms of learning in terms of normative principles and behavioral results. We also perform dynamical systems analyses of reduced biophysical models to understand the mapping of these mechanisms into cellular and network models. We collaborate very closely with experimental neuroscience groups, doing in vitro intracellular recordings, multi-unit recordings in behaving animals, and human psychophysical and fMRI experiments.
Beside being a Visiting Professor at the Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, I am a Reader (= USA Associate Professor) in Computational Neuroscience at the Computational and Biological Learning Lab, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge.