Marcel Just is D. O. Hebb

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

Psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

. His research uses

brain imaging Neuroimaging is the use of quantitative (computational) techniques to study the neuroanatomy, structure and function of the central nervous system, developed as an objective way of scientifically studying the healthy human brain in a non-invasive ...

(

fMRI Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area o ...

) in high-level cognitive tasks to study the neuroarchitecture of

cognition Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...

. Just's areas of expertise include

psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...

object recognition Object recognition – technology in the field of computer vision for finding and identifying objects in an image or video sequence. Humans recognize a multitude of objects in images with little effort, despite the fact that the image of the ...

, and

autism The autism spectrum, often referred to as just autism or in the context of a professional diagnosis autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or autism spectrum condition (ASC), is a neurodevelopmental condition (or conditions) characterized by difficulti ...

, with particular attention to cognitive and neural substrates. Just directs the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging and is a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at CMU.

Research

Mind reading

Marcel Just, Tom Mitchell, and colleagues at

are conducting research on "

thought identification In their most common sense, the terms thought and thinking refer to conscious cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation. Their most paradigmatic forms are judging, reasoning, concept formation, problem solving, an ...

" using

. Using

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

techniques, they have been able to identify patterns of brain activation that are reliably associated to the concept of different objects. These signature patterns could be generalized across different participants, so that the authors were able to correctly identify which object a participant was thinking of by analyzing the corresponding brain activation. A demo of their

system A system is a group of Interaction, interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment (systems), environment, is described by its boundaries, ...

was shown on

CBS CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS, the abbreviation of its former legal name Columbia Broadcasting System, is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainm ...

during

60 Minutes ''60 Minutes'' is an American television news magazine broadcast on the CBS television network. Debuting in 1968, the program was created by Don Hewitt and Bill Leonard, who chose to set it apart from other news programs by using a unique styl ...

Autism and the underconnectivity hypothesis

Just and Nancy Minshew are known for the underconnectivity hypothesis of autism, which posits that autism is marked by underfunctioning high-level neural connections and synchronization, along with an excess of low-level processes. Evidence for this theory has been found in

functional neuroimaging Functional neuroimaging is the use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function, often with a view to understanding the relationship between activity in certain brain areas and specific mental functions. It is primarily used a ...

studies on autistic individuals and by a

brain wave ''Brain Wave'' is a science fiction novel by American writer Poul Anderson, first published in serial form in ''Space Science Fiction'' in 1953, and then as a novel in 1954. Anderson had said that he could consider it one of his top five books. Th ...

study that suggested that adults with ASD have local overconnectivity in the

cortex Cortex or cortical may refer to: Biology * Cortex (anatomy), the outermost layer of an organ ** Cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the vertebrate cerebrum, part of which is the ''forebrain'' *** Motor cortex, the regions of the cerebral cortex i ...

and weak functional connections between the

frontal lobe The frontal lobe is the largest of the four major lobes of the brain in mammals, and is located at the front of each cerebral hemisphere (in front of the parietal lobe and the temporal lobe). It is parted from the parietal lobe by a groove betwe ...

and the rest of the cortex.

Computational cognitive modeling

Marcel Just also co-developed with Sashank Varma 4CAPS, a cognitive architecture that specifies how different cortical regions of the brain collaborate to perform specific tasks. 4CAPS model have been used to explain behavioral and brain imaging data in different experimental tasks.

References

External links

60 Minutes: Can brain imaging be used to read the mind?Marcel Just's Biography - Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition
Autism researchers Carnegie Mellon University faculty American cognitive neuroscientists Living people Stanford University alumni Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-psychologist-stub