Action and Consciousness Laboratory

Director \|	Ezequiel Morsella, Ph.D.
	Ezequiel Morsella is interested in the conscious (e.g., urges, self-control, working memory) and unconscious mechanisms in human action production. His research integrates experimental approaches that are cognitive, affective, neurobiological, and social cognitive to illuminate the nature of the basic unconscious and conscious mechanisms in human action production. Specifically, to understand the nature of these mechanisms, he has investigated action production at different levels of analysis and in different contexts, including simple actions, speech production, subjective urges, social action, and language use (communication cognition). Thus, his approach is broadly based in terms of dependent measures: cognitive, affective, social, and neurobiological. He received his Ph.D. working with Robert M. Krauss at Columbia University and carried out his postdoctoral training (fall 2003 thru spring 2007) with John A. Bargh at Yale University. As an undergraduate, he was mentored by Robert B. Tallarico at the University of Miami (B.A., 1996, Phi Beta Kappa, Cum Laude). Following his post-doctoral training, he was hired as an Assistant Professor of Social Cognitive Neuroscience at San Francisco State University and as an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. For more information about his research, please visit http://morsella.socialpsychology.org. To read his published fiction, click here.

Collaborators\|	John A. Bargh, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, Yale University
	Robert M. Krauss, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, Columbia University
	Jeremy R. Gray, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, Yale University
	Adam Gazzaley, M.D., Ph.D., Dept. of Neuroscience, UC San Francisco
	Stephen C. Krieger, M.D., Dept. of Neurology, Mount Sinai Medical, NYC
	T. Andrew Poehlman, Ph.D., Southern Methodist University
	Lawrence Williams, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, Yale University
	Avi Ben-Zeev, Ph.D., Dept. of Psychology, San Francisco State University
	Mark W. Geisler, Ph.D., Dept. of Psychology, San Francisco State University

The Lab\|	Photos of Action and Consciousness Lab The Space; Guests

Lab Members\|	Students, Technicians, and Research Assistants
	Taylor Rigby, the manager of the lab, has just finished her BA in comparative world literature and is now embarking on a BA in psychological research. She hopes that her background in art and literature will add a unique perspective to her research on the nature of executive control and high-level cognition (e.g., "the interpreter"). For one of her studies, she is employing the experimental technique of backward masking. She hopes to go on to do an honors thesis at SFSU and then pursue a PhD and career in cognitive neuroscience.

	Christopher C. Berger is interested in the relationships among self-control (e.g., action suppression), automaticity, and conscious processing (e.g., subjective urges). For his honors thesis, he is investigating the influence that newly acquired action plans have on the execution and subjective components of previously acquired action plans. Because his approach is inherently interdisciplinary, he looks forward to collaborating with cognitive neuroscientists, social/personality psychologists, and psychophysiologists.

	Using his background in physics and electrical engineering, Tim Gerrits designs devices for experiments in the lab. He is moving towards a career in cognitive science and human factors. He believes games can be valuable research tools so he built an electronic memory game to investigate the role of movements in working memory. Tim plans to investigate the interactions among working memory, response interference, and perception (e.g., binocular rivalry).

	An undergraduate at SFSU, Meredith Lanska is investigating the liaison between conscious, episodic memory and action. Her experiments combine the tools of action and memory research. She hopes to go on to pursue a PhD in cognition/cognitive neuroscience and become a research scholar at a university setting.

	Using standard laboratory paradigms involving automaticity, Travis Riddle is investigating the interplay between subjective urges and cognitive conflict (e.g., response interference), with the goal of illluminating the role that this interaction has on authorship processing (how people attribute their own actions, and cognitive processes, to the 'self').

	Karen Paz Acosta is investigating why certain cognitive processes intrude or 'break through' into conscious awareness while others remain deep in unconsciousness. Together with Taylor Rigby, she will be conducting an experiment to assess which aspects of post-perceptual processing modulate awareness in a systematically and theoretically-predictable way, which would shed light on the nature of conscious urges and self-regulation.