People

Dr. Lorna Quandt

Associate Professor, PEN; Science Director, ABL and ML2

Dr. Lorna Quandt is an Assistant Professor in the PEN Program.

In her role at the NSF-Gallaudet University Science of Learning Center called Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2), Dr. Quandt is the Science Director of the Motion Light Lab and, in early 2016, also founded the Action & Brain Lab (ABL).

Dr. Quandt's ABL team uses EEG and other psychophysiological measures to investigate the neural substrates of action as applied to visual language and visual learning. Topics include the role of experience in learning new actions, self-other body representations, and the role of mirroring systems in signed languages.

Dr. Quandt earned an undergraduate degree from Haverford College, where she used ERPs to investigate how anxiety and depression affect error monitoring. For her senior thesis work, Dr. Quandt studied the effects of perceived interpersonal similarity upon vicarious error monitoring.

After her matriculation, she worked in Dr. Elizabeth Sowell's Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at University of California Los Angeles, doing standardized neuropsychological testing and longitudinal fMRI imaging. Her primary work there examined the effects of prenatal teratogens on working memory function during childhood.

Dr. Quandt earned a Ph.D. in Psychology at Temple University in 2013, concentrating in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She conducted doctoral work in Dr. Peter Marshall's lab at Temple. Her graduate work examined alpha and beta EEG rhythms to investigate how varying experiences with action might affect neural activity during subsequent action observation.

During her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, while working with Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, Dr. Quandt investigated how visual perception and sensorimotor systems interact, particularly with regard to action processing. She used univariate and multivariate functional neuroimaging (MVPA) to look more closely at how and where representations of action might exist in the brain. She also studied the relations between action language (e.g., verbs) and perception.

Dr. Quandt continues to be interested in how prior experiences with action shape our perceptions, and how motor resonance may be related to this process.