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RESEARCH INTERESTS
How
does the human mind innovate and create using past and present
knowledge? What enhances--or impairs--our ability to optimally
take advantage of our acquired experience and learning? How can
we best promote mental agility to creatively and adaptively meet
challenges, and to make the most of opportunities across the
lifespan? What cognitive, behavioral, and brain mechanisms are
central to an agile mind? My lab, using the diverse and
convergent methodologies of cognitive neuroscience, explores these
questions focusing particularly on the role of different levels of
specificity of representation and varying levels of cognitive control. The iCASA
Framework I have
developed the integrated Controlled-Automatic, Specific-Abstract
(iCASA) framework for conceptualizing the processes and representations
that contribute to agile thinking. Although thinking clearly does
involve concepts and memory, thinking is intimately interconnected with
our goals and actions, emotions, perception, and our physical and
symbolic environment. And at the dynamic interface of these all
is our brain. In this
framework, a central requirement for optimal mental agility is the
ability to show what I call "oscillatory range" in both our levels of
representational specificity, and our levels of cognitive
control. When we are mentally agile, we are able to adaptively
move between highly deliberate and intentional modes of control, to
more spontaneous, to more automatic forms of control as circumstances
change and in accordance with our goals. We are also able to
flexibly move between representations that are extremely abstract or
general to representations that are specific, without becoming
"constrained" to overly abstract or excessively detailed construals of
the situation. The
iCASA framework builds on the strengths of dual-process accounts of
cognition that bifurcate modes of thinking into two classes, such as an
“Intuition” vs. “Reasoning” system, or “System 1” vs. “System 2.”
However, the iCASA framework addresses significant limitations of those
accounts by explicitly recognizing continuous variation (gradations) in
both levels of representational specificity (LoS) and levels of
cognitive control (LoC) -- in not only concepts or memory, but also in
our representations of goals and actions, perceptions, and
emotions. The iCASA framework also emphasizes the intimate
reciprocal influence of our symbolic, physical, and social-emotional
environment on the mind-brain. The environment, broadly
conceived, is continually and dynamically altering our LoS and LoC at
multiple time-scales and at multiple levels (e.g., cognition and
emotion).
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