Dr. Silvia Bunge is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California at Berkeley. She directs the Building Blocks of Cognition Laboratory, which draws from the fields of cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and education research. She is the co-author of a forthcoming textbook titled Fundamentals of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (Bortfeld & Bunge, Cambridge University Press, in press).
The lab studies the cognitive and neural processes that support reasoning, memory, and goal-directed behavior in humans. The lab also 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.
The lab has been funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, a Jacobs Foundation Advanced Career Research Fellowship, an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award given every year to 100 scholars in any field, and more. Professor Bunge is an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Sciences and the Society of Experimental Psychologists (founded in 1904).