Courses Taught:
Experimental Psychology; The Cognitive Neuroscience of Film; Current Debates in Psychology
Research Interests:
Professor Zacks studies perception and cognition using behavioral experiments, functional MRI, computational modeling, and testing of neurological patients. One line of research examines how people parse the continuous stream of behavior into meaningful events, and how this affects memory and cognition. Another line examines how mental imagery contributes to reasoning about spatial relations, especially how mental representations of one's body are updated during imagery and reasoning.
Selected Publications:
Fox, M. D., Snyder, A. Z., Zacks, J. M., & Raichle, M. E. (2005). Coherent spontaneous fluctuations in neuronal activity account for response variability in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 9, 23-25.
Zacks, J. M. & Tversky, B. (2005). Multiple systems for spatial imagery: Transformations of objects and bodies, Spatial Cognition & Computation, 5, 271-306
Michelon, P., Vettel, J. M., & Zacks, J. M. (2006). Lateral somatotopic organization during imagined and prepared movements. Journal of Neurophysiology, 95, 811-822.
Michelon, P., & Zacks, J. M. (2006). Two kinds of visual perspective-taking, Perception & Psychophysics, 68, 327-337.
Zacks, J. M., Swallow, K. M., Vettel, J. M., & McAvoy, M. P. (2006). Visual movement and the neural correlates of event perception, Brain Research, 1076, 150-162. |
