Joanna Peters
Graduate Student
PsyD Candidate - Clinical Psychology
Intended Neuropsychology Concentration and CBT Track
Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Yeshiva University
Research Interests:
- Clinical Interests: Although I am currently working with a diverse population of all ages at Montefiore Medical Center's Neuropsychology Department, my passion lies in working with children with learning, developmental, and psychiatric disorders. I plan to practice general pediatric neuropsychology, although I would like to specialize in the diagnosis and treatment of children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. Furthermore, I would like to provide group therapy to such individuals to improve various aspects of functioning using predominantly cognitive and behavioral strategies.
Research Interests: Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) display marked impairment in social cognition, communication, and more specifically, emotion recognition. I am interested in understanding the neurobiological underpinnings of each of these domains in children with ASDs, particularly looking at how deficits in multisensory integration might impact emotion recognition. For example, evidence suggests that multisensory integration is necessary for effective speech perception, and people often utilize speech in addition to visual cues such as facial expression to infer particular emotions. Individuals with ASDs appear to demonstrate impairments in high-level audiovisual integration, which may contribute to communication deficits such as speech perception (Magnee, et al., 2008). While most people tend to use both speech and visual cues to identify others' emotions, those with ASDs may have trouble integrating information from both the auditory and visual domains and therefore experience greater difficulty accurately identifying emotions. Additionally, because emotion recognition and processing are core components of appropriate social skills, I would like to see if a relationship exists between emotion recognition accuracy and a broader neuropsychological measure of social abilities and/or communication skills.