Faculty Directory

Dr. Dien's primary research and teaching interests is in cognitive neuroscience, the approach of integrating the theories and paradigms of cognitive psychology with the frameworks and methods of neuroscience. His primary topic of interest is the laterality of expectancy processes, guided by my Janus model (Dien, 2008) that the left hemisphere is focused on anticipating the future and the right hemisphere is focused on responding to the (recent) past. His primary experimental designs are semantic priming and oddball paradigms. Studies are also in progress examining the hypothesis that anxiety and stress differentially affect these processes. More generally, he is interested in individual differences in these processes, which has led him to become interested in the role of these processes in the cultural domain (cultural neuroscience) and autism. He uses both electrophysiological (event-related potentials) and regional cerebral blood flow (functional magnetic resonance imaging) methods to study these issues. He also has an active line of research advancing the multivariate statistical techniques used to interpret such data, especially how to co-register them. He is the sole developer of the EP Toolkit, a full-featured open source Matlab software suite for ERP analysis used by hundreds of users around the world.