VSS 2024 – a great Vanderbilt showing
May. 26, 2024—This year, Vanderbilt was well represented at the Vision Sciences Society (VSS) conference with several exciting presentations from researchers from Psychology as well as other departments. Randolph Blake and Isabel Gauthier presented during the awards ceremony as their received, respectively, the Ken Nakayama Medal and the Davida Teller awards, Frank Tong had a talk in...
Kickball 2024 edition!
May. 16, 2024—This year’s Kickball event was a success! Playing under the tent was surprisingly nice, and we didn’t break anything. A team of staff, faculty and student from Psychology (aka “not Ashleigh’s team”) was victorious against the younger, stronger and eager (but perhaps still too green?) team of students from PSY 1200 General Psychology Maymester (team...
5/24/24 John Reynolds: Intrinsic Traveling Waves and Visual Perception
Apr. 23, 2024—John Reynolds, PhD Professor, Fiona and Sanjay Jha Chair in Neuroscience The Salk Institute for Biological Studies Systems Neurobiology Laboratory Date: Friday, May 24, 2024 Time: 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Location: 1220 MRBIII Intrinsic Traveling Waves and Visual Perception Perceptual sensitivity varies from moment to moment. One potential source of this variability is spontaneous...
Radnor Lake birdwatching April 20, 2024
Apr. 23, 2024—(Our full list for that morning can be found here: https://ebird.org/checklist/S169454419) At Radnor Lake, with gentle tread, The psychology folks, with eyes ahead, Spied birds aloft and on the wing, In a chorus only spring could bring. Canada Geese in stately flight, Wood Ducks glimmered in morning light, Mallards waddled, a charming view, Chimney Swifts...
Two A&S psychology faculty receive prestigious awards in vision sciences
Apr. 15, 2024—Two leading scholars in the College of Arts and Science Department of Psychology were recognized by the Vision Sciences Society, the leading international society for vision science research. Randolph Blake, Centennial Professor of Psychology, won the 2024 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science Award for lasting, high-impact contributions to vision science. Isabel Gauthier, David K....
3/7/24 – Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Brown Bag: David Coggan, PhD
Mar. 7, 2024—Modelling human visual perception of occluded objects: insights from training 150 convolutional neural networks. Date: Thursday, March 7 Time: 12:20 p.m. – 1:10 p.m. Location: Wilson Hall 115 Human observers can readily perceive and recognize visual objects, even when occluding stimuli obscure much of the object from view. By contrast, state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs)...
3/5/24 – Clinical Brown Bag Lecture Series: Junghee Lee, PhD
Mar. 5, 2024—Social Cognition in Severe Mental Illness: Where we are and where we are going. Date: Tuesday, March 5 Time: 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Location: Wilson Hall 316 Social cognition refers to a set of abilities that recognize, understand and respond to socially relevant information from oneself and others. Social cognition is considered one of...
3/1/24 – Friday Neuroscience Brown Bag Lecture Series: Ken Rahman
Mar. 5, 2024—Macaque learning of spatiotemporal sequences and their mapping to hippocampal representational geometry Date: Friday, March 1 Time: 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Location: Wilson Hall 115 Hippocampal activity in freely-moving rodents shows the capacity for stable spatiotemporal representations of the environment (through ‘place cells’) that may serve as a cognitive map. These findings have been...
Jon Kaas, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Chair in Social and Natural Sciences
Feb. 28, 2024—Jon Kaas leads a world-renowned neuroscience laboratory that has led to seminal scientific contributions to understand the structure and function of the cerebral cortex. Kaas’s work has received multiple prestigious awards, including the 2021 Ralph W. Gerard Prize in Neuroscience, the highest recognition conferred by the Society for Neuroscience. Kaas has had a groundbreaking career...
Antonia Kaczkurkin, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Feb. 28, 2024—Antonia Kaczkurkin leads award-winning research on understanding the neurobiological mechanisms that contribute to the etiology of internalizing disorders. Her work was recently awarded the prestigious APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, which recognizes researchers who have made transformative early career contributions to psychological science. Kaczkurkin researches the neurobiological mechanisma of how we...