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Director |
Ezequiel Morsella, Ph.D.

Ezequiel Morsella 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. He is an active member of the Center for Human Culture and Behavior. For more information about his research, please visit http://morsella.socialpsychology.org.

He is interested in the basic conscious (e.g., cognitive conflict, urges, working memory) and unconscious mechanisms in human action production. From a systems neuroscience perspective, his research focuses on the differences between the cognitive and neural dynamics underlying conscious and unconscious action production. To illuminate these differences, the research integrates cognitive, affective, neurobiological, and social cognitive experimental approaches, a multidisciplinary approach influenced by the Columbia school of experimental psychology. 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.

Click here to visit his monthly neuroscience blog (posted on the 1st of the month) on consciousness and the brain. To read his published fiction, click here.

He is the lead author of Oxford Handbook of Human Action and author of Expressing Oneself / Expressing One’s Self: Communication, Cognition, Language, and Identity. Funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health, his research has appeared in journals such as Psychological Review, Perspectives on Psychological Science, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. He has served as an editorial reviewer for many journals, including Science, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychological Review; Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience; Cognition, Emotion, Biological Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology:  General, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. As an Assistant Professor he has applied for NSF, NIMH, NIDA, and SOMA grants.

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., University of Colorado at Boulder
  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; Guests1 2
   
Lab Members| Postdocs, Students, Technicians, and Research Assistants
Dr. Merrit Hoover, the lab's Postdoctoral Research Associate:
The world is a beautiful, complex place, but the amount of information present is computationally overwhelming. How do we make determinations about the relevance of information in a dynamic, changing world? How do these determinations change with slight modifications in task demands or contextual changes? My research uses a variety of experimental paradigms to explore the limits and contributions of embodied cognition to information processing through the lens of visual memory and memory representation.

Representative publication:
Hoover, M. A., & Richardson, D. C. (2008). When facts go down the rabbit hole: Contrasting features and objecthood as indexes to memory. Cognition, 108, 533-542.
   
Paree
 How does the conscious perception pathway interact with what has been construed as the unconscious action pathway(s)? Pareezad Zarolia, the lab manager, is addressing this fundamental question in an experiment that examines the link between mental simulation and emotional processing. In addition, she is developing new paradigms to measure the subjective aspects of cognitive conflict. An undergraduate at San Francisco State University, Paree plans to complete her B.A. in Psychology and go on to earn a PhD in Cognitive Psychology. She recently successfully concluded a summer fellowship to conduct cognitive research at Stanford University.
   
Berge
 The most senior lab member, Christopher C. Berger has investigated people's lay intuitions regarding how the body and mind/brain function, automatic imitation (e.g., whether tip-of-the-tongue states are contagious), and the relationships among self-control (e.g., action suppression), automaticity, and conscious processing (e.g., whether new action plans weaken the urge strength of older plans). Because his approach is inherently interdisciplinary, he looks forward to collaborating with social/personality psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists. To learn more about his research, click here.
   
Lanska
 Meredith Lanska, interim lab manager for summer 2009, is investigating in her honors thesis 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. Her recent experiment develops a new, parametric technique for associating the contents of episodic memory.
   
Maggie Lynn is a second-year graduate student interested in conscious processes and mental representation. Her studies focus on the role of propioceptive feedback in the sense of agency, the dynamics of motivation and the urge to quit, the perceptual and motor components of subvocalization, and distinguishing forms of cortical binding. She is also interested in the ways that contemporary psycholinguistic findings can inform theories about the nature of the interplay between conscious and unconscious processing in human action production. Click here to learn more about her research.
   
Tara C. Dennehy is a second-year graduate student interested in the threshold between conscious and non-conscious perceptual processing and how action may influence entry into attentional awareness. Tara is currently conducting a series of studies examining how top-down action-related mechanisms influence what enters attentional awareness when visual targets are presented subliminally. Tara is also working on a paradigm examining the influence of unconscious stimuli in the 'attentional blink.' To learn more about her research, click here.
   
Tanaz Molapour is a graduate student interested in the unconscious cognitive dynamics that can give rise to preferences and affective responses toward situations and incidental stimuli. For one of her projects, she is using backward masking to present visual objects subliminally. Tanaz's basic research on how, through processing dynamics, we come to like or dislike neutral (non-biologically-significant) stimuli has broad implications. Click here to learn more about her research.
   
Jason Hubbard is a second year graduate student with a background in cognitive neuroscience. He is interested in the neural underpinnings of complex behaviors arising from the prefrontal cortex, but also has varied interests in aspects of consciousness, information processing, and semantic representation. Currently, he is inverstigating untraditional aspects of the semantic system.
   
A third-year undergraduate student, Leonidas Gkimisis transferred from Athens, Greece to study psychology at SFSU. As a volunteer, he is currently helping out with various experiments. He is interested in how action-related processes determine what enters attentional awareness.
   
Lab Alumni|  
After completing his tenure at the lab, Travis Riddle became a doctoral fellow at Columbia University. Using standard laboratory paradigms involving automaticity, Travis has investigated 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'). In addition, he has investigated the role of proprioceptive feedback in authorship processing.
   

Taylor Rigby has completed a BA in psychological research as well as a BA in comparative world literature (Phi Beta Kappa). In May, she finished her Honors Research Thesis involving the technique of backward flash masking. Taylor was lab manager from fall 2007 until summer 2009. In the future she intends to pursue a PhD and career in research. She is now working on a longitudinal study looking at cognitive decline in healthy aging at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. To learn more about her research, click here.

   
Sepeedeh Cigarchi was a NIMH Career Opportunities in Research (COR) Scholar whose honors thesis experiment resulted in a manuscript (under review) about the cognitive construction of subjective fatigue from top-down control. She is interested in the implications that this kind of basic research has for our understanding of fatigue in pathological conditions (e.g., addiction and certain neurological disorders). Click here to see Sepeedeh Cigarchi's CV.