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Braden Purcell wins honorable mention for James McKeen Cattell Award

Posted on Aug 14, 2014

Braden’s PhD dissertation, Neural Mechanisms of Perceptual Decision Making, has been chosen to receive honorable mention in the 2013-2014 James McKeen Cattell Dissertation competition sponsored by the Psychology Section of the New York Academy of Sciences. The field was highly competitive, with many excellent candidates for the award. His work was highly regarded by the reviewers and by the Steering Committee. The Academy further commended the work of his mentors, Thomas Palmeri and Jeffrey Schall, and the graduate program in Psychological Sciences at Vanderbilt University. In recognition of his noteworthy achievement, he will receive a certificate from the New York Academy of Sciences; his mentors will be similarly recognized. Congratulations Braden!

http://www.nyas.org/awards/13Cattell.aspx

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NSF REU Supplement awarded

Posted on Jul 15, 2014

The CatLab has just been awarded a $19,500 supplementary grant from the National Science Foundation for a Research Experience for Undergraduates. Academic year REU students will receive a $3000 stipend per semester. Summer REU students will receive a $5000 stipend, a $1500 housing and meal allowance, and

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$250 travel allowance. Interested undergraduates should contact Professor Palmeri at thomas.j.palmeri@vanderbilt.edu for information on how to apply.

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Braden Purcell wins Jum Nunnally Dissertation Award

Posted on Apr 22, 2014

Congratulations to Braden Purcell for winning the 2014 Jum Nunnally Dissertation Award! This makes the third CatLab PhD student to win this prestigious award, along with Mike Mack in 2011 and Jenn Richler in 2010.

The Jum Nunnally Dissertation Award recognizes a recent outstanding doctoral dissertation in the Department of Psychology. The recipient receives a certificate and a $500 award. Jum Nunnally came to Vanderbilt in 1960. In 1961, he became the second chair of the department. He served as chair from 1961-1964 and again from 1967-1970. Under Jum’s leadership, the department grew substantially in stature, including significant increases in both the number and quality of the faculty. A memorial fund to support student awards was established in 1982 by his friends and family. Proceeds from this fund were used to establish the Jum Nunnally Dissertation Award in 2010.

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Two new postdocs join the CatLab

Posted on Apr 1, 2014

Brent Miller joins to lab as a postdoctoral fellow this month with a background in computer engineering and psychology. He comes from the University of California, Irvine, where he received his PhD in 2014 with Mark Steyvers. Brent is broadly interested in how the mechanisms of information storage, retrieval, and encoding affect judgment and decision making. Previously, he used computational modeling to show how certain decision behavior necessarily arises from probabilistic information representation in the brain. As a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt, he will work on developing and testing computational models of behavior and neurophysiology in our collaboration with Jeff Schall and Gordon Logan.

Jeff Annis will receive his PhD from the University of South Florida this summer, where he has been studying the relationship between memory and perception via sequential dependencies with Ken Malmberg. Jeff is interested in the mechanisms and representations involved in memory and categorization. He will join the lab as postdoctoral fellow this summer to use computational models and empirical investigations to understand the dynamics of perceptual expertise.

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Paper to appear in PNAS

Posted on Jan 8, 2014

Zandbelt, B.B., Purcell, B.A., Palmeri, T.J., Logan, G.D., Schall, J.D. (2014). Response times from ensembles of accumulators. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [PDF]

Decision making is explained by psychologists through stochastic accumulator models and by neurophysiologists through the activity of neurons believed to instantiate these models. This paper investigated an overlooked scaling problem: How does a response time (RT) that can be explained by a single model accumulator arise from numerous, redundant accumulator neurons, each of which individually appears to explain the variability of RT? 

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