Laura Francesca Mega


Laura F. Mega received her Diploma in Biology (University of Tuebingen) and her PhD in Neuroscience at the Graduate School of Neural and Behavioral Sciences (Tuebingen).

 

She has been engaging with the study of neural and cognitive basis of intuitive judgments, both empirically and theoretically. She is especially interested in investigating the bodily components of intuition, questioning what types of feelings are constitutively linked to intuition and when they are expected to enter the judgment process. Her work is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach and continues to be situated at the intersection of various research communities, broadly falling into the domain of social judgment and perception. Laura is curious about the dynamic relationship between (low level) perceptual processes and the social/cultural practices these processes are trained on. In her view, the elucidation of the functional characteristics and contributions of intuitive processes to the formation of these percepts are of fundamental importance. Not only for the furthering of the theoretical debate on intuition, but also to understand the processes which determine social evaluations. She employs fMRI and eye-tracking, as well as behavioral methods in her work.