Education

Dr. Shinkareva received her Ph.D. in quantitative psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed her post-doctoral training at Carnegie Mellon University.

Research

How affective signals are represented and integrated across audio and visual modalities?

Hedonic valence refers to the pleasantness or unpleasantness of internal states and is a critical building block of emotion. One focus of my research is on elucidating the neural mechanisms underlying the perception of valence in naturalistic stimuli and understanding how the brain represents and integrates valence across visual and auditory modalities. The neurobiological basis of valence is key to understanding emotion integration and regulation in health and disease. Our demonstration of robust identification and localization of affective representation across a variety of stimuli and settings provides a solid foundation for the use of these methods in more applied settings.

How the brain represents conceptual knowledge, particularly about abstract concepts?

Conceptual knowledge is fundamental to human thought and communication. Our work on how individual concepts are represented in the brain has laid a foundation for investigating the representation of conceptual combinations, testing theories of conceptual representation, as well as for translational applications.

For an up-to-date list of publications please visit Dr. Shinkareva’s Google scholar page.