Skip to Main Content
  • About
  • Academics
  • Admissions
  • Campus Life
  • News & Media
  • Athletics
  • Support BC
  • Our Campus
  • Fast Facts
  • Administration
  • Initiatives, Plans and Policies
  • A Nationally Recognized Institution
  • International Education
  • Research
  • Our Past, Our Future
  • Offices and Services
  • Consumer Information
  • Contact Us
  • Schools
  • Academic Departments
  • Majors, Minors and Concentrations
  • Interdisciplinary Programs
  • Graduate Programs
  • Doctoral Programs
  • General Education
  • Honors Academy
  • Special Programs
  • International Programs and Study Abroad (IPSA)
  • Academic Resources
  • Library
  • Centers and Institutes
  • Academic Honor Societies
  • Technology
  • Research
  • Faculty
  • Course Schedules and Bulletins
  • Academic Calendar
  • Incoming Freshmen
  • Transfer Students
  • Graduate Students
  • International Students
  • Second-Degree Students
  • Other Students
  • Apply
  • Tuition, Fees and Payments
  • Financial Aid
  • Information Request
  • Visit Campus
  • Undergraduate Admissions Events
  • Graduate Admissions Events
  • BC News
  • BC In the Media
  • Research
  • Videos
  • Brooklyn College Magazine
  • Office of Communications and Marketing
  • Visit us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Twitter
  • Email us a question
  • What the Campus Has to Offer
  • Vice President for Student Affairs
  • Division of Student Affairs
  • Student Clubs
  • Intramurals / Recreation
  • Health and Wellness
  • Commencement
  • Veteran and Military Programs
  • Living in Brooklyn
  • Brooklyn College Foundation
  • Donate Now
  • Visit us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Twitter
  • Email us a question
Brooklyn College

Brooklyn College logo
  • BC WebCentral
  • We Stand Against Hate
  • Calendar
  • Offices and Services
  • Library
  • Career Services
  • Honors Academy
  • Special Programs
  • Prospective Students
  • Current Students
  • Faculty & Staff
  • Alumni & Friends
  • Admissions
  • Undergraduate Admissions
  • Graduate Admissions
  • Apply Online
  • Transfer Evaluations Office
  • Campus Life
  • Financial Aid
  • Honors and Special Programs
  • Library
  • News and Media
  • Public Safety
  • Annual Security Report
  • Registrar
  • Academic Advising
  • Annual Security Report
  • Bookstore
  • Bursar
  • Calendars
  • Campus Life
  • Career Development and Internships
  • Commencement
  • Course Schedules and Bulletins
  • CUNY Blackboard
  • Enrollment Services Center
  • Financial Aid
  • Graduate Studies
  • Initiatives, Plans and Policies
  • International Programs and Study Abroad (IPSA)
  • Library
  • News and Media
  • Offices and Services
  • Pathways
  • Public Safety
  • Registrar
  • Registration Information
  • Resources for Undocumented Students and DACA
  • Scholarships and Awards
  • Student Handbook
  • Sustainability
  • Technology
  • Transfer Evaluations Office
  • Log into CUNYfirst
  • BC WebCentral Login
  • Forgot Your Password?
  • Forgot Your WebCentral ID?
  • New Users
  • College Directory
  • Academic Affairs / Office of the Provost
  • Annual Security Report
  • Senior VP for Finance and Administration
  • Bookstore
  • Calendars
  • Campus Directory
  • Campus Life
  • Center for Teaching
  • CUNY Blackboard
  • Faculty Council
  • Faculty and Staff Development Opportunities (CUNY)
  • Human Resources
  • ITS (Information Technology Services)
  • Library
  • News and Media
  • Offices and Services
  • Public Safety
  • Sustainability
  • Transfer Evaluations Office
  • Webmail
  • Writing Across the Curriculum
  • Log into CUNYfirst
  • BC WebCentral Login
  • Forgot Your Password?
  • Forgot Your WebCentral ID?
  • New Users
  • College Directory
  • Annual Security Report
  • Benefits and Services
  • Brooklyn College Alumni Association
  • Brooklyn College Foundation
  • Brooklyn College Magazine
  • Calendar of Events
  • Chapters and Affiliates
  • Get Involved and Give Back
  • Office of Alumni Engagement
  • Stay in Touch
  • Transcripts
  • Public Safety
  • Contact Us
  • Home
  • Academics
  • Schools
  • School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences
  • Undergraduate Departments
  • Psychology
  • Research

Research

More than a dozen active laboratories in the department focus on topics such as the physiology of taste and preference formation, children's acquisition of spatial knowledge, transactive knowledge in organizations, implicit learning in cognitive disorders, visual functions in Down syndrome, creativity and cognition in the arts, cognition without a spine (i.e., in octopus), hippocampal atrophy in early Alzheimer's disease, implicit impression formation, Darwinian models of mate selection, biomemetic robotics, neurodegeneration in the aged and implicit social cognition.

All labs are well equipped, and many have attracted funding from NSF, NIH, NASA, DARPA, and other organizations. Several faculty members have appointments and working collaborations with research labs in city hospitals and medical schools with access to frontier technologies such as fMRI.

Sign Up for Research Participation

Undergraduate students who are currently taking the Introduction to Psychology course may sign up for research participation.

Faculty Research Specializations

 

Israel Abramov

Visual psychophysics, color vision, spatial vision, visual neuroscience

We study vision – all aspects of vision, in any accessible creature. We have used techniques ranging from anatomy, to electrophysiology, to behavioral methods. We have studied topics from recording responses of single neurons to spectral lights, to impact of environmental light on aesthetics of museum-going, to sex-linked differences in basic visual functions, to categorization of objects seen under degraded viewing conditions. Always, our approach is ultimately based on the biology of the visual system. These studies derive from a program we undertook some three decades ago: creation of a battery of tests to measure many aspects of vision: spatial and temporal resolution, and acuity; color vision, from discrimination to magnitude estimation of color appearance; binocular vision, stereopsis, and stereo-acuity; motion detection; pigmentation of iris and skin. At present we are concentrating on behavioral (a.k.a. psychophysical) studies of sex-linked variations in vision, and detectability of objects when viewing is less than optimal.

Website: Isreal Abramov, Ph.D.

 

 

Elisabeth Brauner 

organizational psychology, transactive memory, organizational communication

The Organizational Psychology Lab studies the relations among cognition, communication, and social structures within organizations. We have focused on transactive memory, communicative processes of knowledge acquisition, and how this can be applied to knowledge management and organizational learning. We have developed methods for investigating transactive knowledge and knowledge transfer using both questionnaires and interaction coding systems. We also conduct applied research that helps organizations with problem analysis and problem solving. Currently, we are working on organizational diagnosis for information transfer processes.

Website:  Elisabeth Brauner, Dr. rer. nat. 

 

 

Benzion Chanowitz

Website: Benzion Chanowitz, Ph.D. 

 

 

Hanah Chapman 

.

Emotions play a pervasive and vital role in our lives, coloring our everyday experience and influencing decisions large and small. Our research examines the evolutionary origins of emotions, their current structure, and how they affect psychological processes ranging from food selection to moral decision-making. Much of our work focuses on disgust, an emotion that is both deeply rooted in biology and profoundly influenced by personal experience and culture. By better understanding disgust, we hope to shed new light on some of the most important issues in affective psychology, including how emotions are organized in the mind and brain, how they affect our attention and memory, and their role in our moral judgments.

Website:  Hanah Chapman, Ph.D.

 

 

Rebecca Chalmers

Website: Rebecca Chalmers, Ph.D. 

 

 

Cheryl Carmichael

close relationships, emotion regulation, health, perceived responsiveness, romantic attachment

The Health, Emotions, and Relationships Team (HEaRT) Lab conducts research aimed at discovering why people with stronger social connections live longer, happier, healthier lives. We examine how personal characteristics (e.g., attachment security) and responsive relationship behaviors (e.g., support provision, physical contact) promote relationship quality, health, and well-being. Our research participants include college students, community couples, and online workers. We collect self-report, behavioral, and psychophysiological measures using a combination of experimental and experience sampling approaches to study relationships processes in the laboratory and in the ebb and flow of day to day life.

Website: http://bcheartlab.com/

 

 


Elizabeth Chua

metamemory, memory, metacognition, neuroimaging, eye tracking, brain stimulation

Our research focuses on memory and metacognition. We are interested in, not just how information is encoded and retrieved, but also our knowledge and awareness of our memory, and how this impacts our behavior. Much of our work focuses on how we monitor our memory and the basis of confidence in memory.  We are also beginning to examine how our confidence guides the strategic choices we make for improving memory performance. We use a variety of behavioral and cognitive neuroscience techniques, including functional and structural MRI, TMS, tDCS, eye tracking, and psychophysiology to understand our memory, our confidence in our memory, and when our confidence and accuracy go together and when they do not.

Website: http://userhome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/echua/

 

Matthew Crump

computational modeling, skill-learning, memory, attention, natural-language processing, pattern-recognition and production

How do people learn new skills like playing a musical instrument or typing on a computer keyboard? How does memory work? How do people pay attention to their surroundings? How do people become sensitive to patterns and regularities in their environment? We investigate these kinds of questions with experiments that test theoretical and computational models of human cognition. Students with a strong interest in computer programming and data-analysis are encouraged to contact Dr. Crump.

Website: https://crumplab.github.io/

 

 

Andrew Delamater

associative learning, reward processing, interval timing, Pavlovian extinction learning, cortico-striato-limbic pathways in associative learning, relational learning processes, prediction error mechanisms, connectionist network models

The Delamater lab explores the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms involved in simple forms of associative learning mostly in rodent models. We use a variety of behavioral and behavioral neuroscience techniques including (a) targeted brain structure lesions, (b) pharmacological inactivation, (c) chemogenetic manipulations using DREADDs, (d) immunohistochemistry labeling (e.g., cFos), and (e) sophisticated behavioral tests. One project investigates the nature of reward processing where we focus on the question of how the brain learns to anticipate “what” reward is likely to occur in the near future as well as precisely “when” it will occur. We ask whether these two aspects of learning engage separate underlying neural systems, and we also ask to what extent “prediction errors” along these different “what” and “when” dimensions might be critical for brain plasticity. Another project explores the nature of the associative network that could give rise to the ability to time future rewards. To explore this we have devised a neural net model that is capable of showing temporally organized behavior as well as various phenomena related to interval timing. A third project examines the nature of extinction learning in Pavlovian conditioning. In particular, we ask what conditions might be especially helpful in promoting response loss after learning has taken place. Here, as well, we attempt to dissect learning into its separate components (sensory, temporal, emotional) and ask whether extinction processes might differentially impact these different forms of learning. Additional projects address other aspects of associative learning including (a) learning about higher order conditional relationships among stimuli, and (b) assessing striatal contributions to goal-directed and habitual control of associatively learned instrumental behaviors.

Website: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/psych/delam/

 

 

Angello DiBello

Website: Angello DiBello, Ph.D.  

 

 

 


Jennifer Drake

emotion regulation benefits of drawing; drawing giftedness; visual thinking; aesthetic judgment

My research program focuses on the psychology of the visual arts. In one line of research, I examine the emotion regulation benefits of engaging in drawing for children and adults. I have shown that drawing improves mood by allowing for distraction rather than expression. My current work delves deeper and more systematically into the question of how drawing to distract elevates mood. In a second line of research, I examine variation in drawing ability, asking what underlying abilities are seen in children who show exceptional graphic realism skill at a very young age. I have found that drawing prodigies and precocious realists have superior perceptual skills. Finally, I study children’s and adult’s responses to and understanding of works of visual art.

Website: www.jenniferdrake.com

 

 

William Esber

.

Our lab investigates the neural substrates of associative learning at the systems neuroscience level. We focus on associative learning processes because they form the building blocks of cognition, and provide us with an analytically tractable tool to study all sorts of interesting topics, from craving to categorization. Our overarching questions are how neuronal circuits encode information during learning and how this information later influences decision-making.

Website: William Esber, Ph.D.

 

 



Ana Gantman

morality, moralization, consent, intentionality, visual perception, attention, audition

The Gantman Lab investigate the process of moralization (when preferences become values) and its consequences for behavior, cognition, and perception. Our research investigates how context, rather than content, determines moral relevance and so we emphasize and explore the context-dependence of moral relevance, and we investigate both the processes that underlie moralization, and its applications to social issues. We use a number of different methods ranging from techniques from vision sciences and cognitive psychology, to surveys, classic social psychology lab experiments and field work. We are committed to research that is theoretically rich and pragmatically useful. We bear in mind, Lewin’s idea that “There is nothing so practical as a good theory” and James’ notion that we study the “rich thicket of reality.”

Website: www.anagantman.com

 

 



Yu Gao

.

Our research focuses on the neurobiological and psychosocial bases of antisocial behavior, psychopathic, and autistic traits in youth and adults. We are particularly interested in identifying early risk factors that may predispose youth to antisocial behavior, and the protective factors that can buffer young people from the risks of becoming antisocial. One line of research focuses on conditioning deficits in individuals with aggressive and antisocial behavior. We also examine emotion dysregulation and reward processing abnormalities in youths with behavioral problems. We use multi-modal methods from longitudinal and cross-sectional perspectives. The psychophysiological methods we use include electrodermal activity (EDA), cardiovascular activity such as heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV)/respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), and pre-ejection period (PEP). We also use structural and functional brain imaging (sMRI and fMRI).

Website: The Psychophysiology Lab

 

 



Stefano Ghirlanda

learning, animal behavior, cultural evolution

I study how animals and people learn, including learning and evolution of traditions and culture. I conduct experiments on human learning and I build computational models of learning and cultural evolution. I accept undergraduate and graduate students, especially if interested in computational modeling.

Website: Stefano Ghirlanda, Ph.D.



Frank Grasso

Website: Frank Grasso, Ph.D.

 
 

Curtis Hardin

Website: Curtis Hardin, Ph.D.



Glen Hass

Website: Glen Hass, Ph.D.



Louise Hainline

Website: Louise Hainline, Ph.D.



Natalie Kacinik

Website: Natalie Kacinik, Ph.D.



 

Aaron Kozbelt

creativity, psychology of the arts, humor

My research focuses on creativity and the psychology of the arts. I use laboratory, survey, and archival methods to study questions like perceptual differences between artists and non-artists, how creativity unfolds over the lifespan in classical composers, how artists dynamically evaluate emerging creative products, the psychology of humor production, and possible evolutionary constraints on human psychological aesthetics. 

Website: Aaron Kozbelt, Ph.D.

 

Anjali Krishnan

Website: Anjali Krishnan, Ph.D.


 

Yana Kuchirko

Developmental psychology, cross-cultural development, language development, socio-economic differences in development, naturalistic research methods

My research focuses on the role of culture and context in child development. Specifically, I examine how socioeconomic context shapes young children’s cognitive development, how children’s everyday interactions vary by cultural context, and how settings (e.g., childcare, school, neighborhoods) shape children’s learning trajectories. To answer these questions, my students and I use a combination of survey, interview, and observational methods to capture daily experiences of children and their families from different ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Website: https://www.culturelabbc.com/



Greg Kuhlman

Website: Greg Kuhlman, Ph.D.

 

 

Daniel Kurylo

Cognitive Neuroscience; perceptual impairment in clinical populations; visual system; visual perception

My research focuses on how information is integrated across areas of the brain. This topic is addressed by studying characteristics of perceptual organization in healthy individuals, clinical populations (including individuals with brain injury or schizophrenia), and in an animal model. Members of the lab gain experience with techniques used to measure perceptual abilities, developing neuropsychological assessment for clinical groups, and applying these techniques to assess perception in animal models.

Website: Daniel Kurylo, Ph.D.

 

 



Rona Miles

Website: Rona Miles, Ph.D. 

 

 


Erika Niwa

Website: Erika Niwa, Ph.D. 

 

 



Eli Osman

Website: Eli Osman, Ph.D. 

 

 



Laura Rabin

Cognitive, Neuroscience, Testing, Methods and Measurements, Philosophical Psychology

My research investigates the objective and subjective cognitive changes that precede the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, with implications for the diagnosis and treatment of individuals in the earliest stages of neurodegenerative decline. Older adults who present with subjective cognitive decline (SCD), despite intact neuropsychological functioning, may represent the first symptomatic manifestation of Alzheimer’s disease. Research on this topic, however, lacks a standardized definition and approach to assessment. I work with collaborators to develop and refine a conceptual framework and research criteria for SCD. I also address measurement issues in neuropsychology through the development and validation of instruments able to capture subtle cognitive changes. A particular interest relates to the assessment of practical judgment in older adults at risk for exploitation. Although my research focuses on cognitive aging, work with students has spurred my interest in innovative teaching approaches and psychological, academic, and behavioral predictors of educational success. I investigate these topics to improve undergraduate course outcomes and, more broadly, the mental health of diverse students.

Website: Laura Rabin, Ph.D.

 

 


Laura Reigada

Website: Laura Reigada, Ph.D. 

 

 



Sally Robles

Website: Sally Robles, Ph.D. 

 

 



Jacob Shane

Lifespan development; motivation, goal selection and pursuit; perceived opportunities and constraints.

My research examines how motivation and opportunity direct and reflect individuals' development across the life span. I am particularly interested in the dynamic relationships between individuals' broader beliefs about society, their beliefs about themselves, and their motivational commitment to central life goals.

Website: Jacob Shane, Ph.D. 

 

 



Alvin Snadowski

Website: Alvin Snadowski, Ph.D. 

 

 



Peter Weston

Website: Peter Weston, Ph.D. 

 

 



Deborah Walder

neurodevelopment, neurocognition, stress, mental health risk, psychosis, schizotypy, depression

Our research emphasizes identification of early neurodevelopmental markers of risk for mental health disorders such as psychosis and depression, and the contributory role of other factors such as stress and sex/gender differences. We study biomarkers of risk (using neurohormone assay, neuropsychological testing, brain imaging techniques) and environmental factors (such as stress) among high-risk youth, young adults at psychometric risk, and healthy individuals from the general population. This includes use of prospective methods to better understand the early trajectory of illness, with an eye toward preventive intervention.

Website: Deborah Walder, Ph.D.

 
 
 
 
  • Faculty
  • Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Fellows
  • Majors, Minors and Concentrations
  • Courses
  • Yearly Course Rotation
  • Department Overview and Goals
  • For Students
  • Research
  • Department Colloquium
  • Resources
  • For Graduate Students
  • Contact Us
  • Participate as a Subject in Current Studies
  • Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU)
  • In-House Conference

 

Hidden Pages:


Image of a phone with social media icons.

Let’s Stay Connected

Our social media directory features all our accounts from across campus.

Campus Reentry

Campus Reentry

Planning and preparing for a safe, gradual return to campus.

Group of faculty members

Outstanding Professors

Our highly trained faculty are leaders in their fields. Come learn from them.

View of the upper portions of buildings from the residential neighborhoods around the Brooklyn College campus.

Housing Options

Learn about housing options that are available in Brooklyn. 

  • Home
  • Directory
  • Employment
  • IT Remote Support
  • Remote Technology Resources
  • Privacy Policy
  • Policies
  • Contact
  • Text Only Website
  • Site Map
The City University of New York

© 2021 All Rights Reserved Brooklyn College
2900 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11210
718.951.5000 -10.1.1.11