Emily A. Wasserman emily-wasserman

Project Hope + Cliff Effects Team

What we're trying to solve:

Imagine that you are a person on government benefits, and you get a raise. You're making more money, and that's great! But there's an income cutoff for the benefits you receive, and now that your income is higher, you don't make the cutoff. Even though you're making more money, your situation is worse. Some of your benefits drop to nothing, or almost nothing. You've fallen off "the cliff".

A visualization of how working memory load impacts a Theory of Mind task. Subjects viewed 6 sets of 6 Mind in the Eyes trials, of which 4 sets were "load" sets. In "load" sets, trials were interspersed with letters, and subjects were asked to recall the letters at the end of the set.

Data visualization

Displays average Mind in the Eyes score in load/no load sets for each of 50 participants. Horizontal lines indicate overall mean score for load and no load. Cognitive load did not have any significant effect on Mind in the Eyes performance.

Representational similarity analysis

I spent over a year working on the project that became this paper, together with Alek Chakroff, Liane Young, and Rebecca Saxe. As a result, when friends and family asked me what I was doing at work, my answer often involved me attempting to explain what exactly 'representational similarity analysis' is. There's a lot of scientific references out there now for neuroscientists interested in this technique - here's one - but not much for those outside the field. Here's my attempt at making this concept accessible!

Neural representations

Words on a page encode meaning. DNA encodes proteins. And neurons encode thoughts. That's the basic assumption on which I'll premise this entire analysis: that patterns of neural activation contain information about cogn

A visualization of how working memory load impacts a Theory of Mind task. Subjects viewed 20 false belief trials, of which 6 sets were "load" trials. "Load" trials were interspersed with letters, and subjects were asked to recall the letters at the end of the set.

Data visualization

Displays average score (percent correct) in load/no load sets for each of 53 participants. Horizontal lines indicate overall mean score for load (red) and no load (blue). Cognitive load did not have any significant effect on false belief performance.

A visualization of how working memory load impacts a Trait Judgment task. Subjects viewed 36 trait-judgment trials, of which 6 were "load" trials. "Load" trials were interspersed with letters, and subjects were asked to recall the letters at the end of the set.

Data visualization

Displays average score (percent correct) in load/no load sets for each of 42 participants. Horizontal lines indicate overall mean score for load (red) and no load (blue). Cognitive load did not have any significant effect on trait judgment performance.

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