Nalini Ambady

Post-doctoral Fellow

Tufts University
Psychology Department
490 Boston Ave.
Medford, MA 02155

About me
I am currently interested in investigating how various aspects of person construal (i.e., how we perceive and understand others), mostly when perceiving faces, are implemented at the behavioral and neuronal levels. My work will take place in the labs of Nalini Ambady (at Tufts) and John Gabrieli (at MIT), fostering the integration of social cognitive and cognitive neuroscience perspectives. During my Ph.D. studies at Dartmouth College I pursued similar topics of investigation using behavioral and brain imaging techniques.

Publications

• Cloutier, J., Heatherton, T.F., Whalen, P.J., & Kelley, W.M. (2008). Are attractive people rewarding? Sex differences in the neural substrates of facial attractiveness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20, 941-951.

• Cloutier, J., Turk, D., & Macrae, C. N. (2008). Extracting information from faces: The neural substrates of gaze detection and sex categorization. Social Neuroscience, 3, 69-78.

• Cloutier, J., & Macrae, C. N. (2008). Self-involvement and the cognitive status of things past. Consciousness & Cognition, 17, 125-135.

• Cloutier, J., & Macrae, C. N. (2007). Who or what are you?: Facial orientation and person construal. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37, 1298-1309.

• Mitchell, J. P., Cloutier, J., Banaji, M. R., & Macrae, C. N. (2006). Medial prefrontal dissociations during processing of trait diagnostic and nondiagnostic person information. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 1, 49-55.

• Mason, M. F., Cloutier, J., & Macrae, C. N. (2006). Perceiving individuals and groups: Category and stereotype activation from facial cues. Social Cognition, 24, 540-562.

• Cloutier, J., Mason, M. F. & Macrae, C. N. (2005). The perceptual determinants of person construal: Reopening the social-cognitive toolbox. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 885-894.