Eric Schumacher, assistant professor of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is the featured CNS member for the month of December

1) What are your research interests?

Whether we’re driving a car, cooking dinner, performing a psychology experiment, or even watching television, we’re performing goal-directed behavior.  We must keep track of our current goal (e.g., to cook dinner), so that we do not execute responses inappropriate for the present situation (e.g., sitting down to watch television).  Yet, we must also flexibly adapt our goals to changing situations.  For example, we must override our “cooking” goal with an “answering” one when we hear the telephone.  My research focuses on the mental processes required to carry out these and other types of goal-directed behavior. 

A complicated set of mental processes is involved in behaviors like these.  In addition to maintaining and updating our goals, we must attend to relevant stimuli, store relevant information in memory, and select and execute appropriate responses.  What is the nature of these processes?  How do they interact?  What are their limitations?  How do they change with training?  And what are the neural mechanisms underlying them?  These are they types of questions I investigate using a variety of experimental techniques: including behavioral testing, functional neuroimaging, and magnetic stimulation.

2) What do you like most about what you do/study?

I like the variety and freedom of my job.  During any given day I may teach in the classroom, meet with students, design experiments, run subjects, analyze data, read papers, write manuscripts, or engage in some other intellectually stimulating activity entirely!  I get to decide what to do and when to do it.  People outside academia might look at my daily routine and see a guy just sitting at his desk most of the day, but to me each day is different, interesting, and exciting. 

3) What is your most relevant publication and/or presentation?

The publications that most represent my current interests are Schumacher et al. (1999; 2001) and Schumacher, Elston, and D’Esposito (2004).  Schumacher et al., (1999) used a standard behavioral procedure (i.e., the psychological refractory period procedure) to show that people can make basic perceptual-motor decisions, or response selections, for two discrete tasks simultaneously.  Schumacher et al. (2001) showed that people can be trained to perform two tasks simultaneously as quickly and as accurately as they perform each one alone. These and other data suggest that there is no immutable central response-selection bottleneck; rather people adopt strategies that may or may not be optimal to help them perform in multiple-task situations.  Schumacher, Elston, and D’Esposito used fMRI to investigate the performance of perceptual-motor tasks to show that response selection processes may be mediated by different networks of brain regions depending on perceptual task characteristics.  The existence of task-specific response selection brain networks is consistent with my behavioral data suggesting that these processes may occur simultaneously, and that processing delays are likely caused by strategic choices we adopt to perform in complicated multiple-task situations.

4) To date what is your proudest personal or professional achievement?

Personally, I’m very proud of my 10 year old daughter, Caitlin.  I am constantly surprised and delighted by her curiosity and creativity.

Professionally, I am proud of achieving my current position.  I recently accepted an Assistant Professorship at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  After six years in graduate school and five years as a post-doctoral fellow, I am pleased to be “on my own” – starting my own laboratory and training my own students.

5) In your opinion, what are some important issues in cognitive neuroscience?

One important issue for cognitive neuroscience is to discover how the functional regions of the brain together to process information and produce behavior.  We must move beyond functional cortical mapping and begin to discover how brain regions interact. This includes understanding how control mechanisms modulate processing in unimodal sensory and motor cortices as well as understanding how non-cognitive mechanisms like emotional and personality states affect processing in the brain.

6) Why are you a member of CNS?

My first academic presentation was in 1994 at the first meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.  I have been to almost every meeting since.  I enjoy the society because of its small size and personal atmosphere.  Yet, the society is large and prestigious enough to attract scientists from a variety of neuroscience and psychology disciplines from throughout the world. 

I also enjoy visiting San Francisco and New York every other year.

7) Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

I’ve wanted to be a brain scientist since my first semester of college.  Now that I finally have my own laboratory, in 5 years I hope to be doing exactly what I’m doing now – hopefully with a little more knowledge and not too much more gray hair!