 Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of California,
Los Angeles, 2003
Cognition and Neuroscience of Reasoning, Memory, and Attention
Email: daniel.krawczyk@utdallas.edu
Phone: 972-883-4474
Office: JO 4.204
 Krawczyk Lab Website
About Daniel Krawczyk
Dr. Krawczyk began his research as an undergraduate at the State University of New York, College at Fredonia, where he studied human memory. He went on to complete his doctoral training at the University of California, Los Angeles in Cognitive Neuroscience. His research focus at UCLA included human reasoning and decision-making. During his doctoral training Dr. Krawczyk studied how people reason by analogy with an emphasis on 1) reasoning about ambiguous analogies and 2) how damage to the frontal or temporal cortex affects people’s ability to process information in picture and verbal tasks. Dr. Krawczyk also studied the way that people make complex decisions and the impact of the decision process on preferences and values.
Dr. Krawczyk continued his interests in decision-making, reasoning, and the frontal lobes during his postdoctoral training at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley he investigated the way that rewards influence working memory. In these studies he employed functional brain-imaging methods (fMRI) to better understand the involvement of several brain areas in human cognition.
In 2006 he joined the faculty at The University of Texas at Dallas in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Dr. Krawczyk is involved with the Center for BrainHealth® at UT Dallas, a multi-disciplinary center for neuroscience research and rehabilitation aimed at improving the lives of those who suffer from neurological or psychiatric disorders. Through this association, Dr. Krawczyk became involved in investigations of reasoning, working memory, and social cognition in disorders such as Autism, Schizophrenia, Traumatic Brain-Injury, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Dr. Krawczyk is jointly appointed in the Psychiatry Department at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. There he is affiliated with the Advanced Imaging Research Center (AIRC) devoted to using functional brain imaging methods to study cognition in healthy and disordered populations such as individuals with ADHD or substance abuse problems.
Research Interests
My research broadly focuses on the way that people attend to and remember information in order to solve problems, reason, and make decisions. I use functional MRI measures to better understand how areas of the brain are involved in attention, short-term maintenance of information, and representing motivating incentives. I am also interested in the brain correlates of memory for faces, scenes, and objects. Findings from these studies indicate that regions involved in attention and memory are activated to a greater extent when motivation is increased. This greater brain activation is often accompanied by faster and more accurate task performance.
I am investigating human reasoning in a separate, but related, line of research. I use picture and verbal reasoning tasks that require subjects to solve analogy problems or draw conclusions based on the relations among items. These tasks have been applied to individuals with Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration (FTLD), a form of dementia resulting in damage to the frontal or temporal cortex, in order to assess the involvement of those brain regions in problem-solving and inhibition of irrelevant items. I use similar tasks to assess the reasoning abilities of individuals with social cognition impairments such as Asperger’s Syndrome, Autism, and Schizophrenia. Work is also underway to investigate reasoning in individuals with ADHD. Findings from these studies have indicated that relational reasoning requires both memory and attention in order to manipulate information to solve problems and to screen out distracting incorrect information. Intact frontal cortex is highly associated with these mental operations.
Additionally, I am interested in how people make complex decisions, such as legal verdicts or economic choices. In this work I have investigated the way that preferences toward options and attributes change as people process information related to a decision. Typically, we find that the act of deciding changes people’s preferences and attitudes so that their eventual choice is well-supported, while the choice they will reject is poorly supported. This effect may explain why people are able to make complex decisions confidently.
Recent Publications
Krawczyk, D. C., Morrison, R. G., Viskontas, I. V., Holyoak, K. J., Chow,
T. W., Mendez, M., Miller, B. L. & Knowlton, B. J. (in press)
Distraction during relational reasoning: The role of prefrontal cortex in
interference control. Neuropsychologia.
Simon, D., Krawczyk, D. C., Bleicher, A. & Holyoak, K. J. (2008)
Constructed Preferences: Transient Yet Robust. Journal of Behavioral
Decision Making, 21, 1-14.
Krawczyk, D. C., Gazzaley, A., & D’Esposito, M. (2007) Reward
modulation of prefrontal and visual association cortex during an
incentive working memory task. Brain Research, 1141, 168-177. |
