New faculty explore how individual minds influence group behavior | Penn Today
Archived: 2026-04-23 17:22
New faculty explore how individual minds influence group behavior | Penn Today
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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.
In response, the center formed the
Interconnected Minds cluster hire
, seeking to hire multiple faculty members focused on understanding how individual minds influence group behavior and vice versa. Since 2023, three new faculty members have joined the
School of Arts & Sciences
under the cluster hire: linguist
Marlyse Baptista,
a neuroscientist
Nacho Sanguinetti
, and humanities scholar
Fritz Breithaupt
.
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.
View large image
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.
View large image
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.
View large image
(Image: Courtesy of Fritz Breithaupt)
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.
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Writer
Erica Moser
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Skip to Content
Skip to Content
News from
University of Pennsylvania
Try Advanced Search
View large image
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.
In response, the center formed the
Interconnected Minds cluster hire
, seeking to hire multiple faculty members focused on understanding how individual minds influence group behavior and vice versa. Since 2023, three new faculty members have joined the
School of Arts & Sciences
under the cluster hire: linguist
Marlyse Baptista,
a neuroscientist
Nacho Sanguinetti
, and humanities scholar
Fritz Breithaupt
.
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.
View large image
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.
View large image
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.
View large image
(Image: Courtesy of Fritz Breithaupt)
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.
Share this article
Threads
Credits
Writer
Erica Moser
Photographer
Eric Sucar
More from
School of Arts & Sciences
MindCORE
Linguistics
Psychology
Literature
Faculty
Research
The Interwoven University
Novel plant-based approach to a better, cheaper GLP-1 delivery system
Health & Medicine
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Research led by Penn Dental’s Henry Daniell investigates the use of a lettuce-based, plant-encapsulated delivery platform as a new oral delivery of two GLP-1 drugs previously approved by the FDA in injectable form.
No brain, no gain: Neuronal activity enhances benefits of exercise
Natural Sciences
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Research led by Penn neuroscientist J. Nicholas Betley and collaborators finds that hypothalamic neurons are essential for translating physical exertion into endurance, potentially opening the door to exercise-mimicking therapies.
Studying Shakespeare through the lens of love
Arts & Humanities
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In Becky Friedman’s English course Shakespeare in Love, undergraduate students analyze language, genre, and adaptation in the Bard’s plays through the lens of love.
Beating the heat: Designing cooling for bodies in motion
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Dorit Aviv, director of Weitzman’s Thermal Architecture Lab, studies how humans, technology, and design intersect, paving the way for the development of novel approaches to cooling people efficiently.