

Research Expertise and Interest
cognition, human brain function, development
Research Description
Dr. Silvia Bunge is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She directs the Building Blocks of Cognition Laboratory, which draws from the fields of cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and education research. Her lab studies the cognitive and neural processes that support reasoning, memory, and goal-directed behavior in humans. The lab further studies how these processes mature over childhood and adolescence, and how they are shaped by education and demographic factors – for better and for worse. Professor Bunge seeks to extend her research to understand individual differences and developmental change in reasoning about real-world phenomena in daily life, as well as in the context of STEM education. To investigate these phenomena, the lab leverages behavioral, structural and functional brain imaging, and eyetracking methods, and experimental, cross-sectional, and longitudinal designs.