Silvia Bunge, assistant professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, is the featured CNS member for the month of November

1) What are your research interests?

I'm interested in cognitive control - that is, how we regulate our thoughts and responses to meet our immediate goals. My research focuses primarily on how regions in prefrontal cortex interact with each other and with other brain regions to produce goal-directed behavior.

Everyone I talk to can relate to my work on some level. Lay people can relate to the problem of keeping a goal in mind, and carrying it out without being distracted. Developmental psychologists would like to understand how children develop the ability to control their thoughts and actions, and social/personality psychologists want to know how we regulate our emotions. This line of research is also important for characterizing failures of cognitive control in a wide range of disorders, as well as in normal aging.

Bunge SA, Kahn I, Wallis JD, Miller EK, Wagner AD.  Neural circuits subserving the retrieval and maintenance of abstract rules. J Neurophysiol. 2003 Nov;90(5):3419-28

I'm proud of having built a strong research team. The members of my laboratory are excited about their research, productive, and highly collaborative.

I think we've barely begun to scratch the surface in terms of understanding how different brain regions interact to give rise to the simplest of behaviors, let alone higher-level cognition. We would have made a lot of progress if we could give a detailed account of the neural mechanisms involved in, say, seeing a stimulus, retrieving a relevant response from long-term memory, and planning and carrying out that response. 

That's a no-brainer (no pun intended). The CNS annual meeting is my favorite conference.

I envision my laboratory probing cognitive control mechanisms more deeply than ever with an arsenal of tools at our disposal: ERPs, fMRI, neuropsychology, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and autonomic measures.