Rob Goldberg Visiting Scientist Office: 46-5115A Telephone: (617) 324-3723 Email:grob@mit.edu

About:

As an undergraduate at Hofstra University, with majors in Philosophy and Psychology and a minor in Religious Studies, I first became fascinated by the differences between ontology and epistemology and how we know what we claim to know. I soon realized that my best hope of examining this very basic problem was through studying the three and half pounds of squishy stuff between our ears. I received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh in 2004 with training at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and at the Learning Research and Development Center. I then completed a post-doc with Sharon Thompson-Schill at the University of Pennsylvania.

My research has investigated how the brain stores and processes our knowledge of the world. This work has found that sensory-motor brain regions appear to support the recollection of object properties (e.g., cocoa, cotton, and cannon) that reference the relevant sensations (e.g., sweet?; soft?; loud?; green?). By contrast, the prefrontal cortex appears to support the increasing abstraction necessary for concepts further removed perceptual experiences. This research has also led me to  examining how biases in cognitive development appear to ground a foundational structure for acquiring advanced knowledge, specifically of biology and even for biology professors. My work in the Gabrieli Lab seeks to merge my previous neuroimaging research with these interests in education and development by examining how functional and anatomical differences within young brains result in divergent outcomes during maturation.

I am also a co-founder of knowhi, the learning engine that learns from you. We are building technologies for showing you who knows what and for quantifying how much they know when you need to learn. But the technologies will succeed only to the extent that we share our knowledge with each other. So, what do you know?


Published Research:

Goldberg, R.F. & Thompson-Schill, S.L. (2009). Developmental ‘roots’ in mature biological knowledge. Psychological Science, 20, 480-487. <pdf>

Goldberg, R.F., Perfetti, C.A., Fiez, J.A., Schneider, W. (2007). Selective retrieval of abstract semantic knowledge in the left prefrontal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 3790-3798. <pdf>

Goldberg, R.F., Perfetti, C.A., Schneider, W. (2006). Distinct and common cortical activations for multimodal semantic categories. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 6, 214-222. <pdf>

Goldberg, R.F., Perfetti, C.A., Schneider, W. (2006). Perceptual knowledge retrieval activates sensory brain regions. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 4917-4921. <pdf>

Thompson-Schill, S.L., Bedny, M., & Goldberg, R.F. (2005). The frontal lobes and the regulation of mental activity. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 15, 219-224. <pdf>

Carter, M. L., Valenti, S. S. & Goldberg, R.F. (2001). Perception of sports photographs: A multidimensional scaling analysis. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 92, 643-652.