Special Issue on Model-Based Cognitive Neuroscience
Thomas Palmeri from Vanderbilt, Brad Love from University College London, and Brandon Turner from The Ohio State University are co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Mathematical Psychology on Model-Based Cognitive Neuroscience. This special issue aims to explore the growing intersection between cognitive modeling and cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive modeling has a rich history of formalizing and testing hypotheses about cognitive mechanisms within a mathematical and computational language, making exquisite predictions of how people perceive, learn, remember, and decide. Cognitive neuroscience aims to identify neural mechanisms associated with key aspects of cognition, using techniques like neurophysiology, electrophysiology, and structural and functional brain imaging. These two come together in a powerful new approach called model-based cognitive neuroscience, which can both inform model selection and help interpret neural measures. Cognitive models decompose complex behavior into representations and processes and these latent model states are used to explain the modulation of brain states under different experimental conditions. Reciprocally, neural measures provide data that help constrain cognitive models and adjudicate between competing cognitive models that make similar predictions of behavior. For example, brain measures are related to cognitive model parameters fitted to individual participant data, measures of brain dynamics are related to measures of model dynamics, model parameters are constrained by neural measures, model parameters are used in statistical analyses of neural data, or neural and behavioral data are analyzed jointly within hierarchical modeling framework.
Editors, Review Board, Ad-hoc Reviewers
The guest co-editors for this special issue of the Journal of Mathematical Psychology will be Thomas Palmeri, Bradley Love, and Brandon Turner; appeals to editorial decisions will be handled by the Editor-in-Chief, Philip Smith. We would like this to be a community effort, so we will invite a subset of contributors to join a review board for the special issue, and we will request other contributors to be willing to review at least one submission.
Instructions for submission
– The submission website for this journal is located at: http://ees.elsevier.com/jmp/default.asp
– To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified for inclusion into the special issue, it is important that authors select SI: Model-Based Cognitive when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process
PEN XXX Reunion Meeting
The Perceptual Expertise Network will be celebrating our 30th workshop by inviting current PEN members, previous PEN members, and PEN friends to join us for a day of talks as well as a reunion dinner following the talks. This will be held on May 14th, 2015 at the TradeWinds Island Grand Resort in St. Pete Beach, Florida, as a satellite to the annual VSS conference.
NEI Grant Renewed
Our NEI Grant Stochastic Models of Visual Decision Making and Visual Search was just renewed for another four years, through end of 2018.
New papers from the CatLab
Shen, J., & Palmeri, T.J. (in press). The perception of a face is greater than the sum of its parts. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
Folstein, J., Palmeri, T.J., Van Gulick, A.B., & Gauthier, I. (in press). Category learning stretches neural representations in visual cortex. Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Shen, J., Mack, M.L., & Palmeri, T.J. (2014). Studying real-world perceptual expertise. Frontiers in Cognition.
Braden Purcell wins honorable mention for James McKeen Cattell Award
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
NSF REU Supplement awarded
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
$250 travel allowance. Interested undergraduates should contact Professor Palmeri at thomas.j.palmeri@vanderbilt.edu for information on how to apply.
Braden Purcell wins Jum Nunnally Dissertation Award
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.
Two new postdocs join the CatLab
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.
Recent PNAS paper highlighted by Vanderbilt News
Research News@Vanderbilt recently did a story about our PNAS paper, “Response times from ensembles of accumulators”: http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2014/02/number-of-neurons/
Paper to appear in PNAS
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?