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 ...

This dissertation explores the cognitive mechanisms and motivations that guide two aspects of human social behavior: thinking about other's experiences and communicating with others. In both cases, studies investigated the ...

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 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 ...

As humans we have a remarkable capacity to sacrifice for the future, and an equally remarkable capacity to shortchange it, leaving our future selves to pay the price. The research in this dissertation suggests that sacrifice ...

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 ...

The present research assessed whether levels of depression, anxiety and worry, obsessive-compulsive distress, and psychopathy were differentially related to distinct thought suppression profiles. As a means to achieving ...

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 ...

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 ...