Mari Frank Interviews Dr. Marcel Just, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging

Marcel Adam Just, the D.O. Hebb Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon and Director of its Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, is a researcher and scientific contributor in a broad set of areas of neuroscience, with major funding for over three decades from NIH (including a Senior Scientist Award) and ONR (Office of Naval Research). He has made pioneering brain imaging contributions in language processing, multitasking, and thought identification (from brain images) that have been published in leading journals. He is the author of one of the leading theories of autism, has recently helped develop the first successful attempt to decode a simple thought from a person's brain activity (published in Science), has demonstrated the brain consequences of cell phone use during driving, and has demonstrated for the first time that the brains of children who are poor readers can be changed, not just in how they activate, but also in their very anatomy. In addition to the scientific research, he has also been involved in relating neuroscience findings to public policy, including providing testimony on the biological basis of autism to the U.S. House of Representatives Government Reform Subcommittee on Human Rights & Wellness, and testimony on cell phone use during driving to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Transportation Committee Hearing. His research uses brain imaging (fMRI) in high-level cognitive tasks to study the neural basis of the architecture of human thought. The fMRI studies attempt to determine the underlying cortical components of the cognitive system and the nature of the collaboration among them in many different types of tasks. The individual projects investigate high level thinking in tasks like sentence comprehension, mental rotation, imagery, object recognition, problem-solving, and decision-making. The projects examine normal cognitive functioning in college students and in adolescents, as well as in special populations, such as patients with autism and children with dyslexia. The fMRI results are being used in the development of a computational theory of cognition called 4CAPS, which models the dynamic, collaborative activity of the brain's large-scale network of computational centers, each drawing on its own set of relative specializations. This approach provides an account of the relation between thought processes and brain activity. For bio and publications information visit: www.ccbi.cmu.edu/people_faculty_content.htm For research center information visit: www.ccbi.cmu.edu