Recent work in moral psychology emphasizes the role of immediate intuitive responses in shaping moral judgments, while at the same time questioning the causal role of more reflective reasoning processes. On this account ...

Working memory, or the ability to maintain and manipulate information such that it can be used to guide behavior, is known to be severely capacity limited, in most circumstances, to about 3-4 objects. Both infants and ...

In many everyday activities, we must visually process multiple objects embedded in complex real world scenes. Our visual system can flexibly extract behaviorally relevant visual information from such scenes, even though ...

Often overlooked in the study of theory of mind (ToM) development, the understanding of motivational states, such as goals and desires, is both an important capacity in its own right and also a likely precursor to more ...

Episodic simulation refers to the construction of imagined, hypothetical events that might occur in one's personal future. Damage to our capacity for episodic simulation can produce grave consequences, impairing our ability ...

Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a behavior recently added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as a condition for further study. In this dissertation, I present findings from three studies ...

Every day we encounter a variety of people, and we need to recognize their identity to interact with them appropriately. The most common ways to recognize a person's identity include the recognition of a face and of a ...

Where one stands in society matters for how one feels, thinks, and behaves. This dissertation provides evidence for this claim from the perspective of universal psychological mechanisms used to navigate the social world. ...

Visual cognition is notoriously limited: only a finite amount of information can be fully processed at a given instant. What is the source of these limitations? Here, we suggest that the organization of higher-level visual ...

Visual memory holds in mind details of objects, textures, faces, and scenes. After initial exposure to an image, however, visual memories rapidly degrade because they are transferred from iconic memory, a high-capacity ...