Executive Function and Social Cognition

Body

The prefrontal cortex plays a fundamental role in human executive function and social cognition. Our research in this area spans a wide array of topics, including decision making, reward processing, reasoning, action planning, response inhibition, metacognition, social judgment, and pro-social/empathic behavior. We aim to gather converging evidence from neuroimaging (fMRI) and lesion studies to further our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying these functions. In our laboratory, we are able to study a unique set of patients with focal penetrating head injuries who have participated in the Vietnam Head Injury Study (VHIS; Raymont et al., 2011), another set of patients with a diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia or corticobasal degeneration, as well as patients with both focal and diffuse brain injuries who live or are currently being treated in the Chicago area. In addition to researching neural mechanisms of executive and social function, our parallel aim is to develop effective treatments and interventions that target domain-specific dysfunction in these areas.