Faculty affiliated with the UCLA Center for Cognitive Neuroscience include:

  • Robert Bilder, Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Psychology, and Chief of Medical Psychology-Neuropsychology, Neuropsychiatric Institute, whose work has revealed abnormalities of brain structure and functional systems in psychotic disorders, and focused on how these may be moderated by novel psychopharmacological treatments and key genetic variations.
  • Susan Bookheimer, Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and of Psychology, whose work has revealed specialized roles for encoding and retrieval of information in long-term memory of adjacent regions of the hippocampus and related cortex, subtle disruptions in which appear in individuals with a genetic susceptibility to Alzheimer’s disease long before the appearance of formal symptoms and signs.
  • Tyrone D. Cannon, Staglin Family Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, whose recent work has demonstrated a network of heteromodal (or higher order) brain regions that are disturbed in schizophrenia, with these disruptions playing a role in the poor integration of cognitive activities in these patients and traceable to mutations in certain genes that participate in CNS development and function.
  • Mark Cohen, Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Neurology, Radiology, Psychology and Biomedical Physics, whose work explores brain plasticity, mental imagery, and addictive disorders, as well as the development of novel tools to study brain function, including his contributions to the earliest work in functional MRI and more recent work on the simultaneous collection of electrophysiologic signals and functional MR images.
  • Stephen Engel, Associate Professor of Psychology, whose work has revealed thatthe primary visual cortex plays a key role in determining what visual information reaches our conscious experience, and that representations of information in this brain region can be strengthened through training.
  • Barbara Knowlton, Associate Professor of Psychology, and Vice-Chair for Undergraduate Education, whose work has shown that a particular brain structure, the hippocampus, is critical for the formation and recall of ‘episodic’ memories, or memories rich in details of the time and location of the moment of learning. 
  • Matthew Lieberman, Assistant Professor of Psychology, whose work has shown that the experience of social distress is mediated by the same brain pathways that are involved in the experience of physical pain, suggesting that evolution has co-opted these physical pain centers for adaptation to increasingly socialized living contexts.
  • Russell Poldrack, Assistant Professor of Psychology, whose work has helped to demonstrate that there are a number of different learning and memory systems in the brain, each specialized for certain types of information or learning contexts, and that different memory systems interact with one another during the learning of new skills, an interaction that is disrupted in patients with Parkinson’s disease.
  • Ladan Shams, Assistant Professor of Psychology, whose research is concerned with the question of how the brain integrates the information from different sensory modalities into one coherent percept. She is interested in the question of multisensory integration from various aspects: how different sensory modalities interact; what brain mechanisms are involved, and what computational principles and mechanisms govern the interactions. Her group probes these questions using behavioral and neuroimaging studies in humans, as well as mathematical modeling.
  • Paul Thompson, Associate Professor of Neurology, whose research focuses on developing new mathematical and computational approaches for analyzing human 3D brain image data. We use these approaches to investigate the major diseases of the human brain, to better understand brain structure and function in health and disease. Paul has made seminal contributions in the areas of brain development, brain atlasing, schizophrenia, drug abuse and tumor growth.
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