 A huge congratulations to Dr. Melisa Gumus for successfully defended her PhD thesis! Melisa's impressive dissertation hit all the corners of the lab's research: characterizing white matter pathways in the hippocampus and their relationship to cognition, linking computational mechanisms of learning to hippocampal processes and representations, and exploring how attention learning is encoded into flexible concept knowledge. Well done, Dr. Gumus!
Melisa was one of the first trainees in the Mack Lab, starting way back in 2016 as an undergraduate research assistant. In the following 9 years, she wore many hats in the lab including RA, lab manager, graduate RA while she completed a master's degree with Carmela Tartaglia, and finally PhD student in Psychology. The Mack Lab is what it is today because of Melisa's persistent motivation for innovative research, her infectious positive spirit, and her gracious support of everyone around her. We will miss her dearly! Melisa's next step is a postdoctoral position with Mariam Aly at UC Berkeley. Best of luck, Dr. Gumus!!  Congratulations to Dr. Mateja Perovic on a very successful defence of her PhD dissertation! Mateja's dissertation details her impressive and ambitious research on how sex hormones and menstrual cycle impact the core mechanisms of category learning. Spanning behavioural experiments, fMRI, hormone analysis, and genotype testing, Mateja's PhD work is comprehensive and provides key theoretical insights in fields of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and women's health. So very proud of Dr. Perovic!
Mateja's next stop is a postdoctoral position, supported by a CIHR Postdoctoral Fellowship, in Liisa Galea's lab. Good luck, Dr. Perovic! Melisa, Mateja, Dory, Sanjivan, and Sagana presented posters on their new findings at Poster Session C and F, on Sunday April 30th and Monday the 31st, respectively.  Poster C21 - Children’s but not adults’ CA2,3/DG differentiates same category information in memory Sagana Vijayarajah, Margaret Schlichting  Poster C49 - Emergence of Attentional Templates in Concept Learning and the Underlying Neural Mechanisms Melisa Gumus, Wen Jia Zhao , Zoey Zhi Yi Lee, Michael L. Mack  Poster C144 - Menstrual cycle effects on rule-plus-exception category learning vary by BDNF genotype Mateja Perovic, Janice Hou, Shreeansha Bhattarai, Cathlin Han, Michael L. Mack  Poster C151 - Hippocampal Representational Shifts Underlie the Learning of Exceptions to Category Knowledge Yongzhen Xie, Michael L. Mack  Poster F47 - Familiarity to everyday scene categories in adults and children.
Sanjivan Loganathan, Sagana Vijayarajah, Margaret Schlichting We are excited to be presenting new studies and cool findings! Check out Mateja’s poster on Tuesday and Melisa’s talk on Wednesday! Melisa will also be presenting a poster as part of her SfN trainee professional development award! Congratulations!
 Congrats to Dr. Emily Heffernan for successfully defending her PhD thesis! Emily's PhD studies have provided valuable insights into the attentional and neural mechanisms underlying the learning of surprising categorical information. Emily is now a postdoctoral fellow in the APPLY lab at the University of Toronto Mississauga, where she is investigating digital readability. We are all very proud of you, Dr. Heffernan! 
Melisa gave an excellent data blitz (and was an outstanding Mack Lab representative) at this year's CEMS. She presented her work on the functional footprints of hippocampal pathways in category learning. Well done, Melisa!  Mack Lab poster presentations at VSS this year!
Saturday, May 18, 2024, 8:30 am – 12:30 pm
 Dory Xie published her first paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. In this work, Dory used novel computational modelling & behavioural approaches to show how selective pattern differentiation and integration support learning and generalization of category exceptions. One interesting wrinkle in the data is that latent representational spaces of category items based on a computational model (thanks again, SUSTAIN!) differ from participants' similarity ratings. Indeed, whereas the model's latent space shows that category exceptions are differentiated from items that follow category regularities, explicit similarity ratings suggest participants are simply grouping exceptions with their respective category. Maybe similarity ratings don't reveal cognition's latent spaces?
Read it here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-024-02501-8 The Mack Lab will be all over CNS this year!
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August 2025
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