Elissa Aminoff

Elissa Aminoff is an associate professor of Psychology at Fordham University. Prior to joining the faculty at Fordham, she was a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Psychology and was an adjunct faculty at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Aminoff received her PhD from the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. She then went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Aminoff uses an interdisciplinary approach by employing complementary methods to explore the cognitive neuroscience of visual scene understanding. Her research is at the intersection of vision and memory exploring how the visual world is interpreted based on experience. She uses fMRI to explore how the human brain processes and represents objects, scenes, and the relationships between them. She has used EEG and MEG to explore the time course of processing these contextual relationships and top-down feedback processing that facilitates our scene understanding. Dr. Aminoff has integrated computational approaches into her research to provide insight into the features that scenes can be broken into and how scenes are represented in the brain. She also applies the research on the neural mechanisms of scene understanding to generate direct predictions about behavior and constructs behavioral studies to explore and support such predictions.