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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This page last modified on
26 February 2010.
Copyright (c) 1995-2010 Christopher F. Chabris. All rights
reserved.