World's Best Scientists 2026 revealed!
Rebecca Saxe

Rebecca Saxe

D-Index & Metrics

Neuroscience

D-Index
87
Citations
41728
World Ranking
1232
National Ranking
630

Psychology

D-Index
85
Citations
41224
World Ranking
1164
National Ranking
721

Research.com Recognitions

  • 2020 - Fellow of John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
  • 2014 - Troland Research Awards, United States National Academy of Sciences For discovering the part of the human brain specialized for understanding what other people are thinking.

Overview

Rebecca Saxe is affiliated with MIT in the United States and has a research focus that spans psychology and neuroscience. Their work predominantly covers cognitive neuroscience and social psychology, with significant contributions also in developmental and educational psychology, sociology and political science, and experimental and cognitive psychology.

The scientist's main topics of research include child and animal learning development, face recognition and perception, action observation and synchronization, psychology of moral and emotional judgment, memory and neural mechanisms, social and intergroup psychology, and evolutionary game theory and cooperation.

Among recent publications, significant papers include:

  • Acute social isolation evokes midbrain craving responses similar to hunger, 2020, Nature Neuroscience
  • Selective responses to faces, scenes, and bodies in the ventral visual pathway of infants, 2021, Current Biology
  • Single-neuronal predictions of others' beliefs in humans, 2021, Nature
  • Why has the COVID-19 pandemic increased support for Universal Basic Income?, 2021, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
  • Planning with Theory of Mind, 2022, Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Frequent co-authors collaborating with Rebecca Saxe include Nancy Kanwisher, Frederik S. Kamps, Heather L. Kosakowski, Hilary Richardson, and Emily M. Chen.

The scientist's work has appeared in various publication venues, with multiple papers published in bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Journal of Vision, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Imaging Neuroscience, and Arabixiv (OSF Preprints).

Rebecca Saxe has been recognized with awards such as the Troland Research Awards from the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2014, which was granted for discovering the part of the human brain specialized for understanding what other people are thinking. Additionally, they were named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2020.

Best Publications

  • Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science

    Alexander A. Aarts;Joanna E. Anderson;Christopher J. Anderson;Peter R. Attridge;Peter R. Attridge

  • People thinking about thinking people. The role of the temporo-parietal junction in "theory of mind".

    Rebecca Saxe;Nancy Kanwisher;Nancy Kanwisher

  • Uniquely human social cognition.

    Rebecca Saxe

  • Making sense of another mind: the role of the right temporo-parietal junction.

    Rebecca Saxe;Anna Wexler

  • Action understanding as inverse planning.

    Chris L. Baker;Rebecca Saxe;Joshua B. Tenenbaum

  • Understanding Other Minds: Linking Developmental Psychology and Functional Neuroimaging

    R. Saxe;S. Carey;N. Kanwisher

  • It's the Thought That Counts: Specific Brain Regions for One Component of Theory of Mind

    Rebecca Saxe;Rebecca Saxe;Lindsey J. Powell

  • Us and Them: Intergroup Failures of Empathy

    Mina Cikara;Emile Gabriel Bruneau;Rebecca R. Saxe

  • The neural basis of the interaction between theory of mind and moral judgment

    Liane Young;Fiery Cushman;Marc Hauser;Rebecca Saxe

  • Disruption of the right temporoparietal junction with transcranial magnetic stimulation reduces the role of beliefs in moral judgments

    Liane Young;Joan Albert Camprodon;Marc Hauser;Alvaro Pascual-Leone

  • Divide and conquer: A defense of functional localizers

    Rebecca Saxe;Matthew Brett;Nancy Kanwisher;Nancy Kanwisher

  • Rational quantitative attribution of beliefs, desires and percepts in human mentalizing

    Chris L. Baker;Julian Jara-Ettinger;Rebecca Saxe;Joshua B. Tenenbaum

  • Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem

    Jorie Koster-Hale;Rebecca R Saxe

  • Their pain gives us pleasure: How intergroup dynamics shape empathic failures and counter-empathic responses

    Mina Cikara;E. Bruneau;J.J. Van Bavel;R. Saxe

  • A region of right posterior superior temporal sulcus responds to observed intentional actions.

    R Saxe;D.-K Xiao;G Kovacs;D.I Perrett

  • Functional Organization of Social Perception and Cognition in the Superior Temporal Sulcus

    Ben Deen;Kami Koldewyn;Nancy Kanwisher;Rebecca Saxe

  • Differential selectivity for dynamic versus static information in face-selective cortical regions.

    David Pitcher;Daniel D. Dilks;Rebecca R. Saxe;Christina Triantafyllou

  • Against simulation: the argument from error.

    Rebecca Saxe

  • Language processing in the occipital cortex of congenitally blind adults

    Marina Bedny;Alvaro Pascual-Leone;David Dodell-Feder;Evelina G. Fedorenko

  • Associations and dissociations between default and self-reference networks in the human brain.

    Susan L. Whitfield-Gabrieli;Joseph M. Moran;Alfonso Nieto-Castañón;Christina Triantafyllou

  • Look at this: the neural correlates of initiating and responding to bids for joint attention

    Elizabeth Redcay;Mario Kleiner;Rebecca Saxe

Frequent Co-Authors

Liane Young
Liane Young Boston College
Kami Koldewyn
Kami Koldewyn Bangor University
Alvaro Pascual-Leone
Alvaro Pascual-Leone Harvard University
Elizabeth Redcay
Elizabeth Redcay University of Maryland, College Park
Mina Cikara
Mina Cikara Harvard University
Daniel Nettle
Daniel Nettle Newcastle University
Alfonso Caramazza
Alfonso Caramazza Harvard University
Susan Carey
Susan Carey Harvard University

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