CFC Brief Biography

Christopher F. Chabris: Brief Biography

I am presently an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Union College in Schenectady, NY. I am also an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Neurology at Albany Medical College and a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. From 2002-2007 I was a Research Associate in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, where I was a member of the laboratory of Stephen M. Kosslyn and I collaborated on the Group Brain Project with him and Richard Hackman. My areas of research interest include:

Individual differences in human cognition and their relationship to brain function and structure
Molecular genetics of human cognition and decision-making
Cognitive and neural mechanisms of expertise, intelligence, and decision-making
Behavioral economics and cognitive biases
Neurodevelopmental disorders (prosopagnosia, ADHD, autism, Williams syndrome)
Visual cognition
Design of information graphics

I collaborate with a number of researchers at a variety of institutions, including:

Thomas Malone (MIT: Sloan School and Center for Collective Intelligence)
Anita Woolley (CMU: Tepper School of Business)
Shaun Purcell (MGH: Center for Human Genetic Research)
Itzhak Aharon (MGH: Radiology)
Jeremy Gray (Yale University: Psychology)
Mark E. Glickman (Boston University School of Public Health)
Brad Duchaine (University College London: Cognitive Neuroscience)
Jeremy Wilmer (University of Pennsylvania: Psychology)
Dan Benjamin (Cornell University: Economics)
Vilmundur Gudnason (Icelandic Heart Association)
Tamara Harris, Lenore Launer (National Institute on Aging)
David Laibson, Ed Glaeser, Jonathan Beauchamp (Harvard: Economics)
Carole Hooven, Peter Ellison (Harvard: Biological Anthropology)
James Lee, Ken Nakayama, Marc Hauser, Steven Pinker (Harvard: Psychology)

In 2004 Dan Simons and I received the Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology "for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else -- even a woman in a gorilla suit." Here we are at the awards ceremony on the left in the front row. Dan and I have co-authored a book titled The Invisible Gorilla that was inspired by this experiment and the response to it.

In Fall 2002 I was a Lecturer (teaching an introductory course on cognitive neuroscience) and from 2001 to 2002 I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Harvard Psychology Department. From 1999 to 2001 I was a Research Fellow at the NMR Center, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. In 1999 I received the Ph.D. degree in psychology from Harvard University, with a thesis titled "Cognitive and Neuropsychological Mechanisms of Expertise: Studies with Chess Masters." (I was advised during graduate school by Steve Kosslyn and Shep White, and I worked on many studies with Dan Simons.)

I received the A.B. degree in computer science from Harvard University in 1988. After that and before graduate school I was the Artificial Intelligence Program Manager in the Psychology Department for five years. For several years I have also done consulting work for research labs, corporations, and government agencies. A long time ago I wrote many articles for computer magazines (for examples, check out The Classic Computer Magazine Archive).

I was the editor of Chess Horizons and the founder of American Chess Journal, and I have written for Games and Commentary magazines, as well as The Wall Street Journal. I have been a chess master since 1986, and I have produced several chess events in Cambridge, Boston, and New York.

I was born in New York City in 1966, grew up in Westchester County, and lived in Massachusetts since graduating college -- until spending a year in Miami and then moving to the Albany area in New York.

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