New faculty explore how individual minds influence group behavior
Linguist Marlyse Baptista, neuroscientist Nacho Sanguinetti, and humanities scholar Fritz Breithaupt were hired through MindCORE for research that fits into the theme of "interconnected minds."
Linguist Marlyse Baptista, neuroscientist Nacho Sanguinetti, and humanities scholar Fritz Breithaupt were all hired through MindCORE under the theme of “interconnected minds,” focusing on how individual minds influence group behavior and vice versa.
MindCORE, Penn’s hub for the integrative study of the mind, brings together faculty across disciplines with diverse approaches to cognitive research. The core of cognitive science has focused on understanding an individual brain in isolation, faculty director Joseph Kable says, but a theme emerged in his conversations with faculty: a desire for more focus on the relationship between individual minds and group behavior.
While each research interconnectedness in a different way, they also embody MindCORE’s ethos of connecting faculty. “This is an example of how bringing people with novel approaches and novel ideas can enrich and be a multiplier,” Kable says, “because not only are they doing their work, but they’re also influencing other people at Penn.”
Understanding language evolution by identifying the building blocks of Creoles
While attending middle school in France, Baptista became intrigued by the differences in sounds between French and her home language, Kriolu, a Portuguese-lexified Creole language spoken in her ancestral Cabo Verde islands.
This sparked an interest in languages, and she is now a contact linguist, studying how long-term interactions between speakers of different languages give rise to new linguistic systems. She leads Penn’s Language Contact and Cognition Lab, specializing in Creole languages—many of which developed on slave plantations and through the trade of goods—and the cognitive processes involved in their emergence.
Baptista uses a variety of approaches, including fieldwork, laboratory experiments, and theoretical modeling. She is currently comparing the morphology and syntax (the structure of words and sentences, respectively) of Cabo Verdean Creole with some of its source languages, such as the West African languages of Mandinka, Wolof, and Temne.
“Language is really one of the quintessential properties of humankind,” Marlyse says. Studying languages like Creoles, she adds, can help people understand language evolution and how new languages emerge, including how speakers use languages around them to build new, highly structured, rule-governed systems.
Understanding animal intelligence and behavior
Sanguinetti heads the Cognitive Neuroethology Lab, which focuses on animal intelligence and the neurobiological processes that support animals’ natural social behavior. His research examines how cognition emerges in the lab and in natural ecological settings. He studies a range of behaviors, including the function, evolution, and variation of play in different species of deer mice, a genus of rodents that exist across North America, and food caching among the agouti, a large diurnal rodent from the Central and South American rainforests.
As a highly diverse mammalian group, rodents make an ideal model for understanding how intelligence evolves in nature, notes Sanguinetti. To this end, students in his lab conduct fieldwork in Panama, studying agoutis’ practice of scattering excess food in caches across the rainforest. This behavior involves deciding how much to store and remembering where the food is, he says, meaning there are “a lot of interesting decisions for neuroscience to study.”
“I’ve always been interested in trying to let the animal do what it does best and try to infer how the brain works in those situations,” Sanguinetti says.
Turning to cognitive science to understand emotions in narratives
Breithaupt’s background is in German and European literature, but he turned to cognitive science to answer the question, “What happens when we, as readers, slip into the shoes of characters?” That led him to explore how empathy functions in narratives, and his research has shown that emotional arcs remain when stories are retold. His 2025 book “The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell,” for example, details a “telephone game” story-telling study involving more than 12,000 participants. He found that in narratives, people retain emotions—such as embarrassment, happiness, or surprise—more than they retain other details, such as cause-and-effect. And a new book in German coming out in May looks at what makes certain experiences transformative and certain memories meaningful.
Currently Breithaupt is getting his Experimental Humanities Lab up and running. He describes it as an open lab, where every member can take the lead and pursue their ideas, relating it to a playground. First-year undergraduate Kaia Feichtinger-Erhart, for example, is comparing telephone game experiments to see whether the emotions driving narratives vary in different languages and cultures.
Breithaupt says the phrase “interconnected minds” perfectly captures his interest in empathy and narratives. “We, as human beings, are not simply locked up in our brain and mind; we can share our experiences with others,” he says.
Penn physicists led by Bo Zhen have created hybrid light-matter particles that interact strongly enough to compute, pointing toward ultrafast, low-energy optical AI hardware.
Penn’s newest supercomputer is transforming research
Penn’s first campus-wide HPC and AI cluster, “Betty,” is expanding access to powerful computing, enabling groundbreaking projects, and fostering new collaborations across disciplines.
A bioengineered bean gum from the lab of Penn Dental’s Henry Daniell is found to reduce the levels of three microbes associated with head and neck squamous cell cancer to almost zero, without affecting the beneficial bacteria normally found in the mouth.
Fighting oral cancer with bioengineered chewing gum
Research led by Penn Dental’s Henry Daniell shows that antiviral and antibacterial chewing gums reduce the levels of three microbes linked to worse outcomes in oral cancers, paving the way for more effective and affordable therapies.
The performing arts at Penn: Process, practice, and purpose
In the vivid tapestry of performing arts groups at Penn, students prepare for their performances while simultaneously enriching their college experience.
