News | CATLAB

Mike Mack accepts faculty position at the University of Toronto

Posted on Jun 5, 2016

Mike will begin this fall as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto. The University of Toronto is one of the oldest and most distinguished departments of psychology in the world.

Mike earned his PhD from our lab and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas for the past several years. At Vanderbilt, Mike won the Jum Nunnally Dissertation Award, a Vanderbilt Dissertation Enhancement Grant, the Pat Burns Memorial Student Research Award, the William F. Hodges Teaching Assistant Award, and was a Learning Sciences Institute Fellow. During his postdoctoral fellowship, he has been funded by an NIH NRSA grant, he was an OPAM conference organizer, and a Memory Disorders Research Society organizer. Mike has published papers in JEP:General, JEP:HPP, Current Biology, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Journal of Vision, Vision Research, and several other journals and other publication outlets. His research combines behavioral experiments, functional brain imaging, and computational modeling to study human learning, memory, and categorization.

We all wish Mike the best of success in his new faculty position.

May Shen wins Lisa M. Quesenberry Foundation Award

Posted on May 30, 2016

We congratulate Jianhong (May) Shen as the 2016 winner of The Lisa M. Quesenberry Foundation Award. This was established by Irvin and Mary Ann Quesenberry and Kathryn Quesenberry to memorialize the accomplishments of their daughter and sister, Lisa M. Quesenberry. It is designed to provide research or study awards to motivated graduate students. Preferably, the awards will be made to female graduate students who are studying the field of psychology and who have overcome significant personal challenges to pursue their education. Congratulations May!

Julie Schnur awarded Founder’s Medal for First Honors in Engineering

Posted on May 13, 2016

Today, Julie Schnur received her Bachelor’s of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Scientific Computing. Julie has worked for the past year as an undergraduate research assistant in the lab under the direct supervision of postdoctoral fellow Brent Miller. At today’s graduation ceremonies, Julie was honored with the Founder’s Medal for First Honors in Engineering, the highest honor bestowed on a graduate of Vanderbilt. A link to the details can be found at http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/05/founders-medalists-honored-at-vanderbilt-commencement/.

This is the second year in a row that an undergraduate researcher in the lab has been so honored; last year’s winner of the Founder’s Medal in Engineering was our own Akash Umakantha.

May Shen and Jeff Annis win Young Scientist Travel Awards

Posted on Apr 12, 2016

Congratulations to May and Jeff on each being awarded 2016 Young Scientist Travel Awards to the Annual Meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology. The award provides $1000 in travel allowance to the society meeting this summer at Rutgers University.

Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU Summer 2016)

Posted on Oct 6, 2015

We are looking for outstanding students interested in a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at the CatLab at Vanderbilt University this summer 2016. Our REU is part of an NSF-funded project entitled Perceptual Categorization in Real-World Expertise. This project uses online behavioral experiments to understand the temporal dynamics of perceptual expertise, measuring and manipulating the dynamics of object recognition and categorization at different levels of abstraction and assessing how those dynamics vary over measured levels of expertise, using computational models to test hypotheses about expertise mechanisms. Students have opportunities to work on projects ranging from the development of online experiments, development of analysis routines, and development and testing of computational models. This REU is especially appropriate for students interested in applying to graduate programs in psychology, vision science, cognitive science, or neuroscience. The REU provides a $5000 summer stipend, $500 per week for ten weeks; an additional $150 per week helps offsets the cost of housing and meals; a $250 travel allowance is also provided. REUs are restricted to undergraduate students currently enrolled in a degree program and must be U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals, or permanent residents of the United States.

PEN XXX Reunion Meeting

Posted on May 20, 2015

The Perceptual Expertise Network celebrated its 30th workshop by inviting current PEN members, previous PEN members, and PEN friends to a day of talks as well as a reunion dinner following the talks. This was held on May 14th, 2015 at the TradeWinds Island Grand Resort in St. Pete Beach, Florida, as a satellite to the annual VSS conference.

Speakers at PEN XXX were:
Thomas Palmeri (Vanderbilt), Opening remarks
Marlene Berhmann (Carnegie Mellon), Never the twain shall meet
Kim Curby (Macquarie University), Are faces super objects? Object-based benefits support holistic perception
Lisa Scott (UMass Amherst), How learning during infancy enhances and constrains brain and behavioral development
Bruno Rossion (University of Louvain), Understanding expertise in face perception with fast periodic visual stimulation
Suzy Scherf (Penn State), Puberty makes us different kinds of face experts
Jim Tanaka (Victoria), Bridging the expertise gap: From the laboratory to the real world
Mike Mack (UT Austin), The evolution of category knowledge: Linking learning models to the dynamics of neural representations
Jennifer Richler (Vanderbilt), Measuring individual differences in high-level vision in a latent-variables framework
Ben Cipollini (UCSD), Exploring anatomy and genetics of cortical asymmetries
Isabel Gauthier (Vanderbilt), 15 years of fMRI studies of expertise
Michael Tarr (Carnegie Mellon), Closing talk

Photos from the workshop can be found here:
http://catlab.psy.vanderbilt.edu/palmeri/public/PEN-XXX/album/index.html

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