The Gabrieli Lab at MIT
The goal of our lab is to understand principles of brain organization that are consistent across individuals and those that vary across people due to age, personality, and other dimensions of individuality. Therefore, we examine brain-behavior relations across the life span, from children through the elderly. Our primary methods are brain imaging (functional and structural), and the experimental behavioral study of patients with brain injuries. The majority of our studies involve functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but we also employ other brain measures as needed to address scientific questions, including electroencephalography (EEG).
Much of our research occurs at the Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute at MIT, which is affiliated with the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. The Martinos centers are a collaboration among the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. Our affiliations with these outstanding research institutions promote the opportunity for cutting-edge basic cognitive neuroscience research and translation from basic science to clinical application.
Face Recognition
Anatomical Connectivity Patterns predict face selectivity in the fusiform gyrus
Zeynep M Saygin, David E Osher, Kami Koldewyn, Gretchen Reynolds, John D E Gabrieli & Rebecca R Saxe 2011
For more than a decade, neuroscientists have known that many of the cells in a brain region called the fusiform gyrus specialize in recognizing faces. However, those cells don’t act alone: They need to communicate with several other parts of the brain. By tracing those connections, MIT neuroscientists have now shown that they can accurately predict which parts of the fusiform gyrus are face-selective.Face Recognition:Read the article
Recognizing voices depends on language ability
Anne Trafton, MIT News Office Jul 29,2011Distinguishing between other people's voices may seem like a trivial task. However, if those people are speaking a language you don't understand, it becomes much harder. That's because you rely on individuals' differences in pronunciation to help identify them. If you don't understand the words they are saying, you don't pick up on those differences. Recognizing voices
What blame can tell us about autism
Anne Trafton, MIT News Office Feb 1,2011
In the mid-1980s, a team of autism researchers theorized that one of the major features of autism is an inability to infer the thoughts of other people. This skill, known as theory of mind, comes naturally to most people — we are constantly evaluating other people’s mental states and trying to determine what they know, what they want and why they are happy or sad, angry or scaredRead the article