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Primary Investigator: Joe Kable, Ph.D.
Joe Kable is the Baird Term Professor of Psychology at Penn and Director of MindCORE (Penn's hub for the integrative study of the mind). For a copy of Dr. Kable’s CV, click here. To visit Dr. Kable’s Faculty webpage, click here. To access Dr. Kable's Google Scholar page, click here. |
Postdoctoral Fellows
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Michael Cohen Michael is interested in interactions between reward, memory, and decision-making, how people assess and control their own knowledge (metamemory), and how these processes change with aging. Much of his past work at UCLA and Northwestern University contrasted direct, reward-driven enhancement of memory, believed to be stimulated by dopamine in the midbrain, with strategic approaches to remembering important information that sometimes but do not always overlap with these effects. In the Kable Lab, he is working on a project related to how memory for social and non-social stimuli affects trust and decision-making related to those stimuli. He is also developing work tying age-related changes to reward and memory systems with potential age-related increases in vulnerability to political misinformation in the real world. www.michaelscohen.net |
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Kenji Kobayashi
Kenji Kobayashi is from Yokohama, Japan. He completed his PhD in Neuroscience at University of California, Berkeley, and received postdoctoral training at Columbia University before joining the Kable Lab. Under the supervision of Joe Kable and Anna Jenkins, he is investigating neurocognitive mechanisms of information seeking in the service of value-based decision making. He is also working on a project examining the causal role of TPJ in decision making in collaboration with the Oathes Lab. |
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Jaime Castrellon Broadly, Jaime is interested in using tools from neuroscience and psychology to understand the basic neural and cognitive mechanisms that support complex social decisions. Jaime received his PhD from Duke University where his work focused on the relationship between dopamine and subjective valuation of rewards. Under the supervision of Joe Kable and Anna Jenkins, he is investigating how social information modulates brain mechanisms of learning and decision making. jcastrel.github.io/ |
Graduate Students
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Christian Benitez Christian is a PhD student in Psychology and received his Bachelor’s Degree in Neuroscience and Psychology from Duke University. He is interested in individual differences in decision making, specifically the role that scarcity and socioeconomic factors influence this process. When not in the lab, I enjoy spending time with my bunny or exploring and walking around everything Philly has to offer! |
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Min Kang Souther
Min is a Ph.D. student in Clinical Psychology, and received her bachelor’s degree from Duke University. After graduating, she completed her master’s at Harvard University and worked as a research assistant at McLean Hospital. Min’s interests focus on the neural processes underlying value-based decision making, and how they may be altered across mood disorders. When she is not in the lab, she enjoys baking macarons and walking her dog all around Philadelphia. |
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Camilla Van Geen Camilla is a PhD student in Psychology and received her Bachelor's Degree in Neuroscience and Philosophy from Columbia University. She is interested in both how memories guide the choices we make and in how the choice we make shape our memories. Outside the lab, she enjoys thinking about adopting a cat, reading poetry and non-fiction, and, more recently, compulsively checking the news. |
Research Specialists
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Colleen Bontrager Colleen earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and works as a joint research specialist for the Kable Lab and a clinical research coordinator for the Center for Neuromodulation in Depression and Stress. Before joining the Kable Lab, she worked as a research assistant for the psychology department at Penn State. Her current project examines the effect of TMS stimulation on the temporoparietal junction on social decision-making. In the future, Colleen hopes to seek a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. In her free time, Colleen enjoys running, cooking, and reading books. Also, she often dreams of the dogs she may own in the future. |
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Laura Zaneski Laura earned her bachelor’s degree in Psychology with a minor in Cognitive Neuroscience from Temple University in 2018, and is now a Research Specialist for the Kable Lab at UPenn. She is broadly interested in how risk, social influence and digital media affect decision-making. Her current work is examining individual differences in explorative behaviors of late adolescents and its relationship with self-reported risk-taking and digital media use. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, playing video games with friends, making artwork and taking pictures of her cat. LinkedIn Profile |
PREP Scholar
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Alex Ramirez Alex is a post-baccalaureate research education program (PREP) scholar at UPenn. She received her B.S. in psychology as a Gardner Psychology Research Scholar from the University of Colorado Denver and is interested in pursing a PhD in neuroscience. In the lab, she is studying information seeking behavior and its neural representation in the context of social decision making. Outside the lab, she can be found listening to music, exploring Philadelphia, cooking, or taking care of her plants. |
Current Undergraduate Students
Bema Boateng
Yifei Pei
Alexandra Vlasenkova
Ece Yildirim
Christian Burrell
Karla Perez
