Learning regularities and exceptions are supported by distinct hippocampal pathways as revealed by diffusion-weighted functional footprints
Wed., Nov 15, 8am-12pm, Poster SS25
Melisa Gumus is presenting a poster at SfN on an exploratory method we call pathway footprints! Can you use white matter pathways to constrain where to look for behaviourally relevant functional activation? If you're looking in the hippocampus, the answer seems to be yes! To learn more, see Melisa at SS25 on Nov. 15!

Melisa Gumus was awarded a 2022 NSERC Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship! This scholarship is only of the most selective and prestigious awards for Canadian graduate students. As described on the Vanier program website: "Vanier Scholars demonstrate leadership skills and a high standard of scholarly achievement in graduate studies in the social sciences and humanities, natural sciences and/or engineering and health".  Congratulations, Melisa!

We are super excited to be back at SfN! Check out Mateja and Emily's poster on Saturday, Dory's poster on Sunday, and Melisa Gumus' talk on Monday: 

We are in-person at CogSci 2022! 

• Talk: T11.2 - Concepts, Yongzhen (Dory) Xie, Differentiating Exceptions in Rule-Plus-Exception Category Learning | proceedings
• Talk: T12.2 - Memory and Learning, Bryan Hong, Emphasizing associations from encoding affects free recall at retrieval | proceedings
• Poster: Session 6, P6-22-1237, Melisa Gumus, Hippocampus Engagement Early in Learning Supports Concept Formation | proceedings
• Poster: Session 7, P7-29-1296, Mateja Perović, Category learning across the menstrual cycle: Learning exceptions to the rule varies by hormonal milieu | proceedings 
• Poster: Session 7, P7-30-2054, Emily Heffernan, An In Silico Exploration of the Effect of Surprising Information on Hippocampal Representations​ | proceedings  

Melisa Gumus' work on characterizing brain network changes with post-concussion syndrome (PCS) is a featured news item at University Health Network: https://www.uhnresearch.ca/news/after-concussion. Congrats, Melisa!

Very excited for Jason Chow's undergraduate research on rapid object categorization published in AP&P! In this paper, Jason looked at the temporal dynamics of object categorization with a novel application of object substitution masking finding an interesting trade-off between basic- and superordinate-level categorization: although superordinate-level categorization demonstrates a clear masking effect very early, it recovers at the first mask offset that impairs basic-level categorization. We argue that this may be evidence of a competitive dynamic between levels of abstraction (e.g., animal vs. dog) during rapid categorization. Jason was one of the first members in the Mack Lab, so excited and proud to have his undergraduate research published! He is currently a graduate student at Vanderbilt University working with Isabel Gauthier and Tom Palmeri. 
 
Chow, J., Palmeri, T.J., Mack, M.L. (2022). Revealing a competitive dynamic in rapid categorization with object substitution masking. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

We are excited to publish a new paper in Hippocampus on the relationship between hippocampal circuitry and category learning. We find that the density of white matter connections between hippocampal subfields CA3 and CA1 relate to individual differences in category exception learning. This work comes from our first MRI study conducted at the U of T Psychology Department's Toronto Neuroimaging Facility. Data collection and analysis efforts were led by incoming graduate student Melisa Gumus and undergraduate student Teresa Zhu and the project was conducted in collaboration with Meg Schlichting. 

Gauen Son's paper, titled "Scene wheels: Measuring perception and memory of real-world scenes with a continuous stimulus space", is now published online at Behavior Research Methods. In collaboration with Dirk Bernhardt-Walter, Gaeun developed a novel method for generating continuous stimulus spaces of synthetic naturalistic scenes with a generative adversarial network (GAN). To validate the method, we demonstrated that 1) human judgements of perceptual similarity aligned with distance in the continuous space and 2) the precision of working memory representations (as indexed with a continuous report paradigm) varies according to the geometry of the scene spaces. Here are all the links: paper, OSF page including example code, and demo of working memory experiment. And, check out the press release!