Catherine L. Reed
Cognitive and DCN

Our ability to recognize people we know, understand the intent of their actions, learn new skills, and interact successfully with the environment relies on our ability to quickly and accurately understand the body positions of others relative to the current positions of our own bodies. Making accurate interpretations of others' actions and emotions and then understanding them within the context of one's own bodily state is difficult task in a constantly changing world. However, creating mappings between the self and other is an essential component both for successful responses to environmental events and for successful interaction in the social world

The goal of my research is to understand the role that the body plays in directing our perception and cognition to the actions of ourselves and others. To develop a unified understanding of how we represent the human body and its actions, I and members of my lab examine the relation between brain function and action using the tools of cognitive psychology, cognitive neuropsychology, and functional neuroimaging (fMRI, MEG). These studies address how we perceive the body postures of ourselves and others, whether the human body is "special" in its recognition and brain representation, how body position and direction influence attention to specific regions of space, how our actions and experiences affect object recognition and emotional processing, and whether the somatosensory system has modality specific object recognition and spatial localization pathways separate from the visual system's.

Representative Publications:

Reed, C.L., & McIntosh, D.N. (in press). The social dance: On-line body perception in the context of others. In R.L. Klatzky, Behrmann, M., & MacWhinney, B. (eds.), Embodiment, Ego-Space, and Action. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Reed, C.L., Beall, P.M., Stone, V.E., Kopelioff, L., Pulham, D., & Hepburn, S.L. (in press). Perception of body postures: What individuals with autism may be missing. Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders.

Bosbach, S, Knoblich, G., Reed, C.L., & Prinz, W. (in press). Body inversion effect without body sense: insights from deafferentation. Neuropsychologia.

Reed, C.L., Grubb, J.D., & Steele, C. (2006). Grasping attention: the effects of hand proximity on visual covert orienting. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 32, 166-177.

Reed, C.L., Stone, V.E., Grubb, J.D., & McGoldrick, J.E. (2006). Turning configural processing upside down: Part- and whole body postures. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 32, 73-87.

Reed, C.L., Stone, V.E., & McGoldrick, J.E. (2005). Not just posturing: The relevance of the body schema for static and dynamic body postures. In W. Printz, M. Shiffrar, I. Thornton, G. Knoblich, & M. Grosjean (eds.), The Human Body: From the Inside Out. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Reed, C.L., Klatzky, R., & Halgren, E. (2005). What versus where for haptic object recognition: an fMRI study. Neuroimage, 25, 718-726.

Slaughter, V., Stone, V.E., & Reed, C.L. (2004). Perception of faces and bodies: similar or different? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, 219-223.

Reed, C.L., McGoldrick, J.E., Shackelford, R., & Fidopiastis, C. (2004). Are human bodies represented differently from other animate and inanimate objects? Visual Cognition, 11, 523-550.

Reed, C.L., Halgren, E., & Shoham, S. (2004). The neural substrates of tactile object recognition: an fMRI study. Human Brain Mapping, 21, 236-246.

Reed, C.L., Stone, V., Bozova, S., & Tanaka, J. (2003). The body inversion effect. Psychological Science, 14, 302-308.

Reed, C.L. (2002). Chronometric comparisons of imagery to action: Visualizing vs. physically performing springboard dives. Memory & Cognition, 30, 1169-1178.

Grubb, JD & Reed, CL. (2002). Trunk Orientation Induces Neglect-like performance in intact individuals. Psychological Science, 13, 554-557.

Reed, C.L., Dale, A.M., Dhond, R.P., Post, D., Paulson, K., & Halgren, E. (2000). Activation of ventrolateral somatosensory cortex for tactile pattern discrimination using MEG. NeuroImage, 11, S688.

Catherine L. Reed
Ph.D. 1991, University of California, Santa Barbara

Associate Professor
office: Frontier Hall,
Rm. 343
phone: 303.871.4622
e-mail: creed@du.edu
website

Director
Cognitive Neuroscience Lab