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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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Kristin Brethel-Haurwitz
Kristin is from Long Island, New York, and has been bouncing between East Coast cities since college. She earned a Ph.D. in Psychology with a concentration in Lifespan Cognitive Neuroscience from Georgetown University and a B.S. in Biopsychology from Tufts University. She is interested in the neuroscience of empathy and social decision-making. Specifically, this includes how intra- and inter-personal emotional processes and their neural substrates contribute to selfless or selfish behavior. Her graduate research in the Laboratory on Social & Affective Neuroscience focused on distress sensitivity and affective resonance in altruistic kidney donors using behavioral and neuroimaging methods. Her postdoctoral research in the Kable Lab is focused on examining how deficits in affective and cognitive empathy lead to excessively selfish social preferences using computational modeling, brain stimulation, and neuroimaging. Outside the lab, she enjoys running, checking out Philly's restaurant scene, and finding new shows to binge. www.brethel-haurwitz.com |
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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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Karolina Lempert
Karolina completed her Ph.D. in psychology at New York University, and her B.A. in neurobiology at Harvard University. Her current research focuses on the neural and psychological mechanisms that underlie individual differences in value-based decision-making. She is especially interested in how our episodic memories affect our decisions about the future, and how this might change as we age. Outside of the lab, Karolina likes to, well, make decisions about the future, by planning lab activities, like trivia and karaoke. She also likes to read and discuss fiction, watch TV dramas, and try new workouts. www.karolinalempert.com |
Graduate Students
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Min Su Kang
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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Arthur Lee Arthur is a joint Ph.D. candidate in psychology and marketing. His primary research interest is modeling and predicting value-based decision-making via statistical models and neuroscientific data. To this end, he often ends up spending a lot of his research hours on developing statistical methods. In his remaining research hours (& also free hours), he dabbles in graphic design for academic figures. arthurstudy.com |
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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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Frances M. Reckers Fran graduated from Swarthmore College with a bachelor’s degree with honors in Neuroscience. Her research interests are in friendship and how social relationships affect emotions and behaviors (e.g., decision making). She is currently working on a project investigating the role of memory in social and non-social learning and decision making. She aims to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology. Outside of the lab, Fran enjoys gardening, baking, and learning to play guitar and ukulele. |
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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, and coming up with unique interior designs. LinkedIn Profile |
Clinical Research Coordinators
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Victoria Halewicz Victoria received her bachelor's degree in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her honors thesis explored how expectations influence visual information processing. Currently, Victoria is working on a TMS project examining impulsivity and selfishness. Overall, she is interested in ways decision-making research can inform interventions of the individual and policy levels. Beyond the lab, she enjoys acquiring new plants, appreciating cinematography techniques, and painting. |
Lab Volunteers
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Jinyi Kuang
Jinyi received her bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland, College Park and is currently a research specialist at the Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics at UPenn. She is interested in the brain basis of social expectations and their impacts on judgment and decision making. Jinyi was involved in studies examining the neuron network signatures associated with perspective-taking and empathic concern. She enjoys classical music, swing dance, and jogging. |
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Ting-Yi Lin With a bachelor degree of business administration back in Taiwan, Ting is currently a master student of Behavioral and Decision Sciences at Penn. Interested in social psychology and neuroeconomics, he plans to pursue a PhD degree in consumer neuroscience, studying behaviors motivated by social identification and group pressures and neural mechanisms behind. Working as a volunteer in Kable lab, he is currently learning brain image analysis with FSL. |
Current Undergraduate Students
Ilyssa Delos Reyes
Thomas Hogeboom
Adam Honig-Frand
Nabil Khan
Joia McGivern
Yifei Pei
Sakshi Sehgal
Brendan Yoo
