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.
Predicting how patients respond to therapy
Anne Trafton, MIT News Office September 6,2012
Brain scans could help doctors choose treatments for people with social anxiety disorder.
A new study led by MIT neuroscientists has found that brain scans of patients with social anxiety disorder can help predict whether they will benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy.Read the article
Face Recognition
Zeynep M Saygin, David E Osher, Kami Koldewyn, Gretchen Reynolds, John D E Gabrieli & Rebecca R Saxe 2011
Anatomical Connectivity Patterns predict face selectivity in the fusiform gyrus
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