Lab Meetings | Sydney Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

2023

Jul 07

Sophia presents findings comparing the neural responses of children and adults during object perception and discusses the implications of these findings for how children may make judgements about whether an object is alive or not

Jun 30

Sophia presents her CogSci2023 conference poster investigating the relationship between how objects move and their neural and behavioural signatures

Jun 02

Cecilia discusses how distance-to-bound measures from Ritchie, Tovar & Carlson (2015) can be applied to investigating neural representations of foods

May 12

Sophia presents findings from a questionnaire exploring subject beliefs about how objects move

Apr 06

Feedback session for Ariel, Sophia, and Denise, who are presenting research posters at the upcoming EPC2023

Mar 31

Christine presents a proposal for her Honours project investigating how differences in culture and thinking styles affect how individuals make food categorisation judgements

Mar 24

Honours students Sophie and Cecilia present their ethics proposal for investigating how hunger states impact neural representations of food

Mar 17

Tom presents a paper for discussion, entitled "Decoding explicit and implicit representations of health and taste attributes of foods in the human brain" by Schubert et al. (2021)

Mar 10

Alex practices a talk for the Aphantasia Network explaining why mental images look so unique compared to other perceptual experiences

Feb 24

Ariel summarises her Honours research into how perceptual, conceptual, and contextual information about objects is represented in the brain

Feb 22

Sophia presents findings from a study investigating the low-level perception of ambiguously-shaped objects

Feb 03

Denise presents findings from an investigation into the factors underlying neural representations of food

2022

Dec 08

End of year lab get-together in the Royal Botanic Gardens

Jul 06

Guest speaker Marc Coutanche presents his work investigating how object concepts are formed and combined in the brain

Jul 05

Sophia and Denise practice their presentations for the upcoming Australasian Brain and Psychological Sciences (ABPS) Meeting

Jun 22

Farewell lunch for Florian, our overseas visitor investigating how the speed at which we recognise objects relates to the speed at which we name them

Jun 10

Amanda visits the group in Sydney, traveling from the Queensland Brain Institute, at the University of Queensland

Jan 17

Sophia discusses the future of her project investigating the relationship between how we perceive aliveness, naturalness, and movement

2021

Dec 03

Sophia and Alex talk at the Sydney Postgraduate Psychology Conference (SPPC) 2021

Nov 19

Denise, Sophia, and Alex talk at the Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society (ACNS) 2021 conference

Nov 16

Denise, Sophia, and Alex premiere their presentations for the upcoming Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society (ACNS) 2021 conference

Oct 28

Guest speaker Alon Zivony presents research explaining attentional phenomena using a temporally-dependent, diachronic account of attention

Oct 07

Guest speaker Matt Davidson presents findings from an investigation into modality-independent neural representations of confidence

Sep 23

General meeting and lab social

Sep 16

Alex presents preliminary findings from a study investigating how people believe they experience their auditory and visual mental imagery

Aug 19

Josh, from Alex Holcombe's research group, presents findings from his Honours project investigating the mechanisms behind visual motion tracking illusions

Aug 10

Guest speaker Hua-Chun Sun presents her PhD work investigating neural representations associated with how we perceive glossy, matte, and rough textures from images

Aug 02

Denise presents her first talk as a new lab member, discussing her work on dissociating the roles of attention, working memory, and decision-making in decoding paradigms

Jul 19

Tom leads a discussion on the ideas presented in "Overarching States of Mind" by Herz, Baror & Bar (2020)

Jul 12

Sophia presents findings from her investigation into neural and behavioural models of how we perceive objects as living or not

Apr 14

Amanda leads a discussion on the ideas presented in "Dynamics of fMRI patterns reflect sub-second activation sequences and reveal replay in human visual cortex" by Wittkuhn & Schuck (2021)

Mar 31

Sophia presents a preview of her Experimental Psychology Conference talk on how our brains represent living things

Mar 03

David Tovar guest presents intracranial electrode decoding results illustrating how representations of visual information may vary across layers of a cortical column

Feb 24

Genevieve Quek guest presents EEG-decoding results on how the relative sizes of related objects may change their neural representations

Feb 18

Josh, our summer research student, discusses his work developing a behavioural experiment investigating how visual recall is distorted by memory

2020

Dec 17

End of year picnic on Manly Beach

Dec 07

General meeting and lab social

Nov 30

Sophia presents updated behavioural and EEG-decoding results on how we process object naturalness, aliveness, and movement

Nov 23

Celebratory lunch for Honours students, Tom and Celeste, who have now submitted their project theses

Nov 16

Alex leads a discussion on his attempts to temporally realign jittered neural decoding data

Nov 09

General meeting and lab social

Oct 26

Ken, a potential lab member, gives a guest lecture on how task relevance affects object decoding in EEG

Oct 19

General meeting and lab social

Sep 24

Ivy introduces the group to a theoretical investigation of how language acquisition may shape object representations

Sep 17

Olivia presents her special project on comparing EEG and behavioural measures of object similarity

Sep 10

Farewell to Chris before he travels to the UK to start a PhD with Alex Woolgar at the University of Cambridge

Sep 03

Celeste presents preliminary findings from her Honours project into semantic similarity in mono- and bilinguals

Aug 27

Sophia leads a discussion on the ideas in "Category-specific attention for animals reflects ancestral priorities, not expertise" by New, Cosmides, & Tooby (2007)

Aug 20

Honours student Tom presents results from his project investigating how different models of language can explain false memory effects

Aug 13

Alex presents his theoretical account of mental imagery using hierarchical predictive processing

Aug 06

Neuromatch Academy debrief by Sophia and Alex

Jul 09

Denise Moerel presents decoding results from an analysis of joint fMRI and MEG data to track the evolution of object representations in the ventral stream

Jul 02

Strategy discussion for how to safely return to EEG testing as pandemic restrictions ease

Jun 25

Guest presentation by Ryo Nakayama from Alex Holcombe's research group, presenting experimental findings on how dynamic noise modulates the "twinkle goes" motion illusion

Jun 18

Sophia presents findings from "A map of object space in primate inferotemporal cortex" by Bao et al. (2020)

Jun 11

Chris practices a talk on his prediction modelling work for later presentation to the UCL Consciousness Club

Jun 04

Amanda's findings on hemisphere-dependent decoding effects are reviewed by the group prior to presentation at the Vision Sciences Society Conference

May 28

Selene and Tom lead a discussion on the viability of app-based developmental psychology research, plus Tom presents ideas from "The Development of Object Categories: What, When and How?" by Poulin-Dubois & Pauen (2017)

May 21

Alex presents findings from an encoding model of mental imagery, presented in "Generative Feedback Explains Distinct Brain Activity Codes for Seen and Mental Images" by Breedlove et al. (2020)

May 14

Honours students Celeste and Tom present their final Honours proposals before starting to experiment

May 07

Chris presents the findings from his recently co-authored paper "Decoding Predictions and Violations of Object Position and Category in Time-resolved EEG"

Apr 23

Celeste presents her refined Honours proposal investigating emotional representation models

Apr 23

Lab catch-up: everyone in the group shares a 3-minute insight into what they're working on during lockdown

Apr 09

Our Honours student Celeste presents possible ideas for a project comparing emotional representations in neural, behavioural, and lingual mediums

Apr 02

Our Honours student Thomas discusses the details of his experimental design for a new study comparing models of semantic associations

Mar 26

Lab discussion on ideas, problems, and solutions relating to running online experiments, prompted by Tijl's new preprint available here

Mar 19

Our first fully-online lab meeting! Sophia leads a discussion on cognitive neuroimaging in infants, presenting results from "Temporal dynamics of visual representations in the infant brain", a new preprint on bioRxiv (2020)

Mar 05

Welcome to our Honours students, Celeste and Thomas! In this meeting, the postgraduates provide advice they wish they'd had before starting their Honours projects

Feb 25

Lab discussion led by Chris on the ideas presented in "A critique of pure learning and what artificial neural networks can learn from animal brains", published in Nature Communications (2019)

Feb 18

Lab discussion led by Tijl on the ideas presented in "Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks", published in Neuron (2020)

Feb 11

Patrick presents his proposal on a new experiment decoding invariant object representations using EEG for his Master's project

Feb 04

Roy updates the group on existing literature surrounding facial expression classification and how facial expressions are used to infer social traits

Jan 28

Alex updates the group on results from visual and auditory imagery decoding experiments with EEG and proposes a new account of imagery vividness

Jan 21

Sophia presents an experimental proposal for her PhD project investigating how an object's implied motion affects its classification under cognitive load

​

2023

Jul 07

Sophia presents findings comparing the neural responses of children and adults during object perception and discusses the implications of these findings for how children may make judgements about whether an object is alive or not

​

Jun 30

Sophia presents her CogSci2023 conference poster investigating the relationship between how objects move and their neural and behavioural signatures

​

Jun 02

Cecilia discusses how distance-to-bound measures from Ritchie, Tovar & Carlson (2015) can be applied to investigating neural representations of foods

​

May 12

Sophia presents findings from a questionnaire exploring subject beliefs about how objects move

​

Apr 06

Feedback session for Ariel, Sophia, and Denise, who are presenting research posters at the upcoming EPC2023

​

Mar 31

Christine presents a proposal for her Honours project investigating how differences in culture and thinking styles affect how individuals make food categorisation judgements

​

Mar 24

Honours students Sophie and Cecilia present their ethics proposal for investigating how hunger states impact neural representations of food

​

Mar 17

Tom presents a paper for discussion, entitled "Decoding explicit and implicit representations of health and taste attributes of foods in the human brain" by Schubert et al. (2021)

​

Mar 10

Alex practices a talk for the Aphantasia Network explaining why mental images look so unique compared to other perceptual experiences

​

Feb 24

Ariel summarises her Honours research into how perceptual, conceptual, and contextual information about objects is represented in the brain

​

Feb 22

Sophia presents findings from a study investigating the low-level perception of ambiguously-shaped objects

​

Feb 03

Denise presents findings from an investigation into the factors underlying neural representations of food

​

2022

Dec 08

End of year lab get-together in the Royal Botanic Gardens

​

Jul 06

Guest speaker Marc Coutanche presents his work investigating how object concepts are formed and combined in the brain

​

Jul 05

Sophia and Denise practice their presentations for the upcoming Australasian Brain and Psychological Sciences (ABPS) Meeting

​

Jun 22

Farewell lunch for Florian, our overseas visitor investigating how the speed at which we recognise objects relates to the speed at which we name them

​

Jun 10

Amanda visits the group in Sydney, traveling from the Queensland Brain Institute, at the University of Queensland

​

Jan 17

Sophia discusses the future of her project investigating the relationship between how we perceive aliveness, naturalness, and movement

​

2021

Dec 03

Sophia and Alex talk at the Sydney Postgraduate Psychology Conference (SPPC) 2021

​

Nov 19

Denise, Sophia, and Alex talk at the Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society (ACNS) 2021 conference

​

Nov 16

Denise, Sophia, and Alex premiere their presentations for the upcoming Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society (ACNS) 2021 conference

​

Oct 28

Guest speaker Alon Zivony presents research explaining attentional phenomena using a temporally-dependent, diachronic account of attention

​

Oct 07

Guest speaker Matt Davidson presents findings from an investigation into modality-independent neural representations of confidence

Sep 23

General meeting and lab social

​

Sep 16

Alex presents preliminary findings from a study investigating how people believe they experience their auditory and visual mental imagery

​

Aug 19

Josh, from Alex Holcombe's research group, presents findings from his Honours project investigating the mechanisms behind visual motion tracking illusions