November 2012
Congratulations to Kirsten Weber who has had her paper "The suppression of repetition enhancement: A review of fMRI studies" accepted to Neuropsychologia. The work was done in collaboration with her colleagues at the Donders Institute: Katrien Segaert*, Kirsten Weber*, Floris de Lange, Karl Magnus Petersson and Peter Hagoort.
*equal contribution
Welcome to Eddie Wlotko who is starting as a postdoc in our lab. Eddie received his PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he carried out ERP research with Kara Federmeier. He will be working at both Tufts and MGH on ERP, MEG, and fMRI studies.
October 2012
Ellen Lau, Phillip Holcomb, and Gina Kuperberg have had their paper "Dissociating N400 effects of prediction from association in single word contexts" accepted by the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Ellen Lau presents a poster at the 4th annual Neurobiology of Language Conference in San Sebastian, Spain.
September 2012
Eric Fields presents a poster at the 52nd annual meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research in New Orleans, LA.
Gina Kuperberg gives a talk entitled "What can ERPs tell us about the dynamics of language comprehension?" and Eric Fields, Nate Delaney-Busch, Kirsten Weber, and Candida Jane Maria Ustine present posters at the 2012 Tufts Cognitive Science Conference on Language and Representation at Tufts University. This conference was held to inaugurate our new Ph.D. program in Cognitive Science.
Gina Kuperberg gives a talk entitled "Language: A Window into Thought in Schizophrenia: Evidence from Multimodal Neuroimaging" at the Neuroimaging Center Seminar Series at McLean Hospital.
Goodbye and good luck to Martin Paczynski who, after completing his PhD in our lab, is joining Dr. Amishi Jha's Lab at the University of Miami.
July 2012
Gina Kuperberg participates in a week-long workshop in Tallinn, Estonia, "Unraveling the Behavioral, Neurobiological, & Genetic Components of Reading Comprehension," sponsored by The Dyslexia Foundation (TDF) and organized by by Brett Miller (NIH/NICHD) and Laurie Cutting. Gina's talk was entitled, “ERP and fMRI studies of comprehending words in context.”
Gina Kuperberg is an invited Professor at the Netherlands Graduate School in Linguistics (LOT), this year organized by the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics at Utrecht University, with the theme, Language, Brain and Cognition. The title of her course is 'Building Meaning from Language: Insights from Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychiatric Disorders.'
Gina Kuperberg sits on the PhD Defense Committee for Nan van de Meerendonk at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, the Behaviour Centre for Cognition and Radboud University, Nijmegen. Nan's thesis was entitled ''States of indecision in the brain: Electrophysiological and hemodynamic reflections of monitoring in visual language perception." Her PhD Advisor was Herman Kolk.
Martin Paczynski and Gina Kuperberg have had their paper "Multiple Influences of Semantic Memory on Sentence Processing: Distinct Effects of Semantic Relatedness on Violations of Real-World Event/State Knowledge and Animacy Selection Restrictions" accepted by Journal of Memory and Language.
Goodbye and good luck to Neil Cohn who, after completing his PhD in our lab, is joining the Center for Research in Language at UCSD, where he will be working with Marta Kutas and Jeff Elman.
June 2012
Goodbye and good luck to Ellen Lau who, after completing her postdoc in our lab, is returning to the University of Maryland as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics.
May 2012
Gina Kuperberg presents a poster at the 67th annual meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry in Philadelphia, PA.
April 2012
Congratulations to Kana Okano who defended her PhD thesis, "The Electrophysiological Investigation on the Time-course of Japanese Word Processing." Kana's committee were: Phil Holcomb, Gina Kuperberg, Katherine Midgley, Jonathan Grainger, and Joanna Morris.
Congratulations to Neil Cohn who defended his PhD thesis, "Structure, Meaning, and Constituency in Visual Narrative Comprehension." Neil's committee were: Gina Kuperberg, Phil Holcomb, Ray Jackendoff, and Marianna Eddy.
Eric Fields presents a poster at the 5th Annual Meeting of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society in New York City, April 2012.
Ellen Lau and Nate Delaney-Busch present posters and Neil Cohn gives a talk at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in Chicago, IL.
The NeuroCognition Lab is very excited to welcome a new member! Julius Charles Kuypers was born on April 2nd, 2012 at 1.51am. 7 pounds, 12 ounces. Congratulations to Eva and Jan!
March 2012
Congratulations to Hugh Rabagliati who has accepted a position as a Chancellor's Fellow in the Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh. Hugh will be staying with us for another few months to wrap up his projects examining top-down and bottom-up cues to language processing in schizophrenia before making his big move. In Edinburgh, Hugh will be a colleague of Mante Nieuwland, another ex-postdoc of our lab, who will also be joining the Department of Psychology as a Chancellor's Fellow in June.
Gina Kuperberg gives a talk as one of The Michael S. Goodman '74 Memorial Lectures, for the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, Providence. "Spatiotemporal Imaging of Sentence Comprehension". She was hosted by Dr. Laura Kertz.
Congratulations to Martin Paczynski who defended his PhD thesis, "Impact of Aspectual and Animacy Information on Semantic and Syntactic Processing: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials." Martin's committee were: Gina Kuperberg (advisor), Phil Holcomb, Tali Ditman and Ray Jackendoff.
February 2012
Welcome to Kirsten Weber who is starting as a postdoc in our lab. Kirsten received her PhD at the Donders Institue where she carried out fMRI research with Peter Hagoort. She will be working at both Tufts and MGH on ERP, MEG, and fMRI studies.
Eric Fields and Gina Kuperberg have had their paper "It's all about you: An ERP study of emotion and self-relevance in discourse" accepted by NeuroImage.
Gina Kuperberg gives a talk as part of the Neurobiology Lecture Series at the University of Texas at San Antonio. "The Neurobiology of Schizophrenia: Spatiotemporal imaging of language."
January 2012
Simona Temereanca, Matti S. Hamalainen, Gina Kuperberg, Steve M. Stufflebeam, Eric Halgren, and Emery N. Brown have had their paper "Eye movements modulate the spatiotemporal dynamics of word processing" accepted for publication in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Neil Cohn, Martin Paczynski, Ray Jackendoff, Phil Holcomb, and Gina Kuperberg have had their paper, "Structure and meaning in sequential image comprehension" accepted for publication in Cognitive Psychology.
Eric Fields learned that his poster, "ERPs reveal rapid effects of the self-positivity bias during the processing of social vignettes", Fields, E. C., Carneiro de Lima, C., Natraj, R., Tusch, E., & Kuperberg, G. R, to be presented at the 5th Annual Meeting of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (New York City, April 2012), received a prize for scoring among the top 5% of abstracts reviewed.
Gina Kuperberg gives a talk at the University Seminar on Language and Cognition, Columbia University, NY. "Spatiotemporal Imaging of Language: a Window into Thought in Psychosis".
December 2011
Gina Kuperberg gives a talk at the Neuroscience Seminar Series, University of Illinois. "What can the study of language tell us about thought in schizophrenia: Insights from Spatiotemporal neuroimaging".
Trevor Blackford, Phil Holcomb, Jonathan Grainger and Gina Kuperberg have had their paper, "A funny thing happened on the way to articulation: N400 attenuation despite behavioral interference in picture naming" accepted for publication in Cognition.
November 2011
Ellen Lau presents a poster, "The effect of prediction on the N400: MEG evidence for a left anterior temporal generator," at the Annual Neurobiology of Language Conference in Annapolis, MD.
October 2011
Gina Kuperberg gives a talk at the Psychology Colloquium Series, Bard College. Her talk is entitled "The influences of memory on normal and abnormal language processing".
Gina Kuperberg is an invited participant in a Workshop for the selection of Research Domain Criteria in Cognitive Systems, for the National Institute of Mental Health.
September 2011
Ellen Lau, Gina Kuperberg, Eric Fields, Neil Cohn, Nate Delaney-Busch, and Eva WIttenberg present posters at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research in Boston, MA.
August 2011
Welcome to Candida Jane Maria Ustine who is starting as a Research Assistant in our lab. Candida Jane Maria graduated from Cornell University with a Master of Engineering in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She will be working at both Tufts and MGH on ERP, MEG, and fMRI studies.
Gina Kuperberg gives a talk in the Psychology Department, University of South Carolina, as part of a colloquium series highlighting the relationship between mind and brain. She was hosted by Fernanda Ferreira and John Henderson. Her talk is entitled "What Can ERPs and fMRI Tell Us about Language Comprehension?".
July 2011
Congratulations to Hugh Rabagliati who has started a Mind Brain and Behavior (MBB) Fellowship working with Gina Kuperberg and Jesse Snedeker on an exciting project, "Testing a top-down impairment hypothesis of linguistic deficits in schizophrenia". Hugh's fellowship constitutes a collaboration across MGH, Tufts and Harvard Psychology. He will be using eye tracking methodology to understand the relationships between bottom-up and top-down processing during language processing in schizophrenia.
May 2011
Gina Kuperberg participates in an Ernst Strüngmann Forum which discusses "Language, Music and the Brain: A Mysterious Relationship". The forum was organized by Michael Arbib and took place in Frankfurt. http://fias.uni-frankfurt.de/ESforum
The NeuroCognition Lab is very excited to welcome a new member! Cameron Matan Ditman-Brunye was born on May 1st at 9:55 PM. Congratulations to Tali, Tad, and big brother Oliver!
April 2011
Gina Kuperberg learned that she won an award for writing one of the Top 5 most cited articles published in the journal Brain Research during the period of 2006 - 2010. Article: Kuperberg, GR. Neural mechanisms of language comprehension: Challenges to syntax. Brain Research, Special Issue 2007; 1146:23-49.
Ellen Lau, Liam Clegg, Wonja Fairbrother, Martin Paczynski, Eric Fields, Nate Delaney-Busch, and Gina Kuperberg present posters and Neil Cohn gives a talk at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco, CA.
March 2011
Eva Wittenberg, Ellen Lau, Liam Clegg, Nate Delaney-Busch, and Gina Kuperberg present posters at the CUNY 2011 Conference on Human Sentence Processing at Stanford University.
January 2011
Martin Paczynski and Gina Kuperberg have had their paper, "Electrophysiological evidence for use of the animacy hierarchy, but not thematic role assignment during verb argument processing" accepted for publication in a Special Issue of Language and Cognitive Processes: the Cognitive Neuroscience of Semantic Processing.
December 2010
Tali Ditman, Don Goff and Gina Kuperberg have had their paper, "Slow and steady: Sustained effects of lexico-semantic associations mediate referential impairments in schizophrenia" accepted for publication in Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience.
Welcome to Kristina Fanucci who is starting as a Research Assistant at Tufts and MGH. Kristina majored in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. She will be working on ERP and fMRI studies at both Tufts and MGH.
November 2010
Gina Kuperberg learned that she won an Award from 'Brain Research' for most cited of all articles published in this journal in 2007 and 2008. Article: Kuperberg, GR. Neural mechanisms of language comprehension: Challenges to syntax. Brain Research, Special Issue 2007; 1146:23-49.
August 2010
Welcome to Scott Burns who is joining the MGH side of the lab. Scott comes from Washington University in St. Louis where he completed a Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering where he worked on designing and implementing of a brain-computer interface using off-the-shelf hardware. He is now switching gears and will be working with Ellen Lau and Gina Kuperberg on a multimodal imaging project which aims to combine MEG, ERPs and fMRI to understand the spatiotemporal dynamics of semantic processing.
June 2010
Mante Nieuwland, Tali Ditman and Gina Kuperberg have had their paper, "On the incrementality of pragmatic processing: An ERP investigation of informativeness and pragmatic abilities" accepted for publication in Journal of Memory and Language.
May 2010
Gina Kuperberg gives the Joseph Zubin Memorial Award Lecture at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Her talk is entitled "Spatiotemporal Imaging of Thought in Schizophrenia".
April 2010
Martin Paczynski, Trevor Blackford, Suiping Wang, Tali Ditman, Marianna Eddy
and Gina Kuperberg present posters at the annual Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting held in
Montreal, Canada.
Gina Kuperberg gives a talk at the Centre for Research on Language, Mind and
Brain, McGill University, Montreal, as part of their Distinguished Lecture
Series. Her talk is entitled "Streams of Language Processing in the Brain:
evidence from ERPs and fMRI".
Neil Cohn defends his Masters Thesis, "Balancing Grammar and Semantics in
'Comics': Global Structure in Sequential Image Processing". His advisers are
Ray Jackendoff, Gina Kuperberg and Phil Holcomb.
March 2010
Sophie De Grauwe, Abigail Swain, Phil Holcomb, Tali Ditman and Gina
Kuperberg have had their paper, "Electrophysiological insights into the
processing of nominal metaphors" accepted for publication in
Neuropsychologia.
Martin Paczynski, Neil Cohn and Ming Xiang present posters at CUNY, held in
New York City.
February 2010
Gina Kuperberg has had a pair of articles accepted for publication in Language
and Linguistic Compass: 'Language in schizophrenia Part 1: an Introduction'
and 'Language in schizophrenia Part 2: What can psycholinguistics bring to
the study of schizophrenia and vice versa?'.
Gina Kuperberg gives a talk at a workshop on Language-Valence Interactions,
organized by Daniel Casasanto and Jos van Berkum at the Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her talk is entitled "ERP
and fMRI studies of Emotional Language".
January 2010
Gina Kuperberg, Martin Paczynski and Tali Ditman have had their paper, "Establishing causal coherence across sentences: An ERP study" accepted for publication in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
November 2009
Martin Paczynski, Trevor Blackford and Tali Ditman present posters at
Psychonomics which was in Boston this year.
Goodbye to Suiping Wang who is returning to China after her year's
sabbatical with us. We will miss her in the lab, but we look forward to
continue working with her to see through her project examining the effects
of task on the modulation of the N400 and P600 ERP components.
October 2009
Welcome to Eva Wittenberg who has joined the lab as a visiting scholar,
funded by a scholarship provided by the European Recovery Program and
administered by the German National Academic Foundation. Eva is coming from
the University of Potsdam where she completed a masters degree working with
Heike Wiese. She will be working with Gina Kuperberg, Ray Jackendoff, Heike
Wiese and Maria Pinango, carrying out an ERP study examining the neural
basis of light verb constructions.
Martin Paczynski presents a poster at the Neurobiology of Language
conference in Chicago: The Impact of Grammatical Voice And Subject Noun Animacy on Verb Processing.
Gina Kuperberg gives a talk at the Center for Research in Language, at the
University of California, San Diego, entitled "What can ERPs and fMRI tell
us about language comprehension?"
September 2009
Welcome to Nate Delaney-Busch, coming from the University of California
Davis, who has joined as a new graduate student. Nate has been carrying out
neuroendocrinology research in prairie voles. This may seem a far cry from
working in a cognitive neuroscience lab, but Nate has also worked with
schizophrenia patients in a mental health clinic and is particularly
interested in applying basic cognitive neuroscience research to
understanding neurocognitive underpinnings of this disorder.
Welcome to Ellen Lau who has joined as a postdoc, coming from the University
of Maryland where she completed her PhD with Colin Phillips and David
Poeppel. Ellen will be working closely with Matti Hamalainen and the
Multimodal Imaging core at the Martinos Center on MEG and fMRI projects
examining the neural basis of the N400.
Gina Kuperberg speaks at The Annual NARSAD Scientific Symposium, Boston, MA.
Her talk is entitled "The Cognitive Neuroscience of Language and Thought in
Schizophrenia".
August 2009
Congratulations to Martin Paczynski who defended his Masters thesis, "Event-Related Potential Evidence for Use of Animacy Hierarchy, but not Thematic Role Type, in the Processing of Direct Object Arguments in Active English Sentences". Martin's committee were: Gina Kuperberg (advisor), Phil Holcomb, Ray Jackendoff, David Caplan and Neal Perlmutter.
July 2009
Goodbye and thank you to Arim Choi and Abigail Swain who have been research
coordinators in the lab over the past two years. Arim will be a graduate
student in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern University
where she plans to study the encoding of speech along the auditory pathway.
Abby will be studying at Bentley University to get an MBA and an MS in Human
Factors.
Gina Kuperberg speaks at a symposium organized by Jeff Zacks, "New Findings
in the Neuroscience of Discourse." at the Society for Text and Discourse
Nineteenth Annual Meeting, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her talk is entitled,
"What can ERPs and fMRI tell us about language comprehension? Streams of
processing in the brain."
Gina Kuperberg, Arim Choi, Neil Cohn, Martin Paczynski, and Ray Jackendoff
have had their paper, "Electrophysiological correlates of complement
coercion," accepted for publication in the Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience.
June 2009
The Kuperberg Lab welcomes Eric Fields, our new Research Technologist. Eric received his B.S.,B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy from Middle Tennessee State University and has a background in Social Psychology. His most recent work, with Dr. William Langston, looked at individual differences in moral judgment.