@ Martinos Center and Tufts University

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.

May 2009

The NeuroCognition Lab is very excited to welcome a new member! Oliver Shai Ditman-Brunye was born on May 22nd at 8:47am, 7lbs 4oz. Congratulations to Tali, Tad and Oliver!

Gina Kuperberg has been awarded the Society for Biological Psychiatry's A.E. Bennet Research Award.

Gina Kuperberg speaks at a symposium, "Probing the neurobiology of symptoms in schizophrenia" at the Society of Biological Psychiatry's 64th Annual Scientific Convention in Vancouver, Canada. Her talk is entitled "Spatiotemporal imaging of loosening of associations in schizophrenia."

April 2009

Trevor Blackford and Martin Paczynski present posters at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society conference in San Francisco. And Martin Paczynski also presents a poster at CUNY in UC Davis.

Congratulations to Alexandra Geyer for being granted her PhD. Her thesis is entitled "Repetition Priming and Concreteness Effects in Bilingualism" and her advisor was Phil Holcomb.

Gina Kuperberg participates in an interdisciplinary workshop and gives several invited lectures on 'the Brain and Language' to students at the Scuola Superiore dell' Università di Catania, Sicily.

March 2009

Gina Kuperberg has been awarded the Joseph Zubin Memorial Award for Research in the field of Psychopathology, co-sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

Tali Ditman and Gina Kuperberg have had their paper, "Building coherence and cohesion: A framework for exploring the breakdown of links across clause boundaries in schizophrenia," accepted for publication in a Special Issue on language and schizophrenia in the Journal of Neurolinguistics.

Donna Kreher, Don Goff, and Gina Kuperberg have had their paper, "Why all the confusion? Experimental task explains discrepant semantic priming effects in schizophrenia under 'automatic' conditions: evidence from Event-Related Potentials," accepted for publication in Schizophrenia Research.

February 2009

Gina Kuperberg, Donna Kreher, Abby Swain, Don Goff, and Daphne Holt have had their paper, "Selective emotional processing deficits in social vignettes in schizophrenia: an ERP study," accepted for publication in Schizophrenia Bulletin.

January 2009

Gina Kuperberg is invited to speak at the Raboud University of Nijmegen Colloquium Series in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Her talk is entitled "So what is monitoring? What ERPs can tell us about the neural basis of language comprehension."

The NeuroCognition Lab welcomes Kana Okano, our new graduate student! Kana will work with both Gina Kuperberg and Phil Holcomb.

November 2008

Tatiana Sitnikova, Don Goff, and Gina Kuperberg have and their paper, "Abnormalities in conceptual processing dissociate disorganization and negative symptomatology during real-world behavior in schizophrenia," accepted for publication in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

The NeuroCognition Lab welcomes Suiping Wang from South China Normal University in Guangzhou, China! Suiping is a Visiting Professor in our lab and is interested in using ERPs to understand language processing in Chinese.

October 2008

Gina Kuperberg participates in a symposium organized by Kara Federmeir entitled "I knew you were going to say that...ERP studies reveal the role of expectancy-driven processes in language comprehension" at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR), Austin, Texas: Gina Kuperberg's talk is entitled "The origins of semantic prediction: a layered processing architecture".

Gina Kuperberg speaks at Psychiatry Grand Rounds and a research seminar and at the Zucker Hillside Hospital, NY. Her talk is entitled "Spatiotemporal imaging of comprehension in schizophrenia."

Gina Kuperberg speaks at the Maryland Linguistics Colloquium Series at University of Maryland, MD. Her talk is entitled "What can ERPs tell us about processing at the semantics/syntax interface?"

September 2008

The NeuroCognition lab at Tufts welcomes three new graduate students into the lab! Trevor Blackford, will be working with Dr. Kuperberg on sentence processing, and Janelle LaMarche and Cherry Yum will be working with Dr. Holcomb on early stages of visual word recognition and bilingual studies.

July 2008

Gina Kuperberg speaks in a symposium on the brain basis of language comprehension at the International Congress of Psychology in Berlin, Germany. Her talk is entitled "From action to syntax: evidence from ERPs and fMRI for common neural systems."

Daphne Holt, Spencer Lynn, and Gina Kuperberg have had their paper, "Neurophysiological correlates of comprehending emotional meaning in context," accepted for publication in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

June 2008

Gina Kuperberg speaks at the 1st Inaugural Schizophrenia International Research Society Conference in Venice, Italy. Her talk is entitled "Selective neural deficits in evaluating emotional information within social vignettes in schizophrenia."

Congratulations to Marianna Eddy for being granted her PhD (Advisor: Phil Holcomb)! Her thesis is titled "An electrophysiological investigation of the time course of object representation." She is taking a position as a postdoctoral researcher in the Gabrieli Laboratory at MIT.

Mante Nieuwland and Gina Kuperberg have had their paper, "When the truth isn't too hard to handle: An event-related potential study on the pragmatics of negation," accepted for publication in Psychological Science.

May 2008

Gina Kuperberg speaks in a Seminar Series in Psychiatric Neuroscience at the Sackler Institute, Cornell Medical School, NY. Her talk is entitled "Spatiotemporal imaging of thought in schizophrenia."

April 2008

Members of the NeuroCognition lab present posters at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society conference in San Francisco.

March 2008

Gina Kuperberg, Donna Kreher, and Tali Ditman have had their paper, "What can event-related potentials tell us about language, and perhaps even thought, in schizophrenia?", accepted for publication in a special issue on Language in Psychopathology for the International Journal of Psychophysiology.

Gina Kuperberg, Caroline West, Balaji Lakshmanan, and Don Goff have had their paper, "fMRI reveals neuroanatomical dissociations during semantic integration in schizophrenia," accepted for publication in Biological Psychiatry.

February 2008

Tali Ditman, Phil Holcomb, and Gina Kuperberg have had their paper, "Time travel through language: temporal shifts rapidly decrease information accessibility during reading," accepted for publication in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

January 2008

Gina Kuperberg has her review paper, "Building meaning in schizophrenia ", accepted for publication in a special issue on Psychosis in EEG and Clinical Neuroscience.