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*.*
Very excited for Emily Heffernan’s work on category exception learning to be published in*Scientific Reports.*In this paper, Emily asked if learning exceptions in a rule-plus-exception category learning task can be significantly improved with a learning sequence that promotes hippocampal encoding. The short answer: yes, in both participants and a neural network model of the hippocampus. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-00864-9
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!
Emily Heffernan was awarded a Computational Modeling Award in Higher Level Cognition for her submission to the 2021 Cognitive Science Society Meeting. Her conference paper explores the role of hippocampal encoding functions in category learning by integrating human behaviour and computational modelling of the hippocampus. Congrats, Emily! Read more: https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/conference-awards/
Melisa’s recent paper on behavioural markers of young-onset Alzheimer’s disease was featured on U of T Faculty of Medicine’s News: https://medicine.utoronto.ca/news/tanz-centre-findings-may-help-detect-young-onset-alzheimers. Well done, Melisa!
Congrats to starred first authors Emily and Juliana! Our new paper, “Identifying the neural dynamics of category decisions with computational model-based fMRI” is now published at Psychonomic Bulletin & Review! Read it here: rdcu.be/ckd27
Melisa Gumus recently published a longitudinal study showing that the prevalence of anxiety and depression is higher in patients with young-onset of Alzheimer’s than those with late-onset, and the difference remains significant over time: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11357-020-00304-y. Congrats, Melisa!
Mike has been awarded a grant from the 2019 Azrieli Future Leaders in Canadian Brain Research program to study the role of hippocampal white matter pathways in human learning. Read more at Brain Canada
https://braincanada.ca/news/major-boost-for-brain-health-in-canada/
