Rafael Núñez, PhD (Lab Director)

I investigate cognition from the perspective of the embodied mind. I am particularly interested in high-level cognitive phenomena such as conceptual systems, abstraction, and inference mechanisms, as they manifest themselves naturally through largely unconscious bodily/mental activity (e.g., gesture production co-produced with conceptual metaphors and blends). My multidisciplinary interests bring me to address these issues from various interrelated perspectives: mathematical cognition, the empirical study of spontaneous gestures, cognitive linguistics, and field research with the Aymara culture in the Andes. My recent book, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (with UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff) presents a new theoretical framework for understanding the human nature of Mathematics and its foundations.

Ben Motz (Graduate Student)

I'm currently investigating how humans perceive and produce rhythm, and how these capacities (or limitations...) influence cognition. I try to approach this topic from an embodied perspective: What can the rhythmic properties of motor actions (such as speech and gesture) tell us about mental states? What sorts of experiences (with language and movement) help build our rhythmic repertoire? How do these rhythmic capacities influence our perspective of time (an otherwise abstract phenomenon)?

Nathaniel Smith (Graduate Student)

Ursina Teuscher, PhD (Visiting Scholar)

In my research I am looking at the phenomena of time and aging from different perspectives. On one hand, I am interested in the abstract thinking and reasoning about time in terms of spatial conceptual mappings. On the other hand, I seek to understand the influence of the time perspective on different aspects of decision making. For more info: http://www.teuscher.ch/ursina/research.