Congratulations Dr. Ross!

Posted on Mar 6, 2012

Congratulations to David Ross for successfully passing the oral defense of his PhD thesis

from Cardiff University. Well done Dr. Ross!

Tim Vickery takes faculty position at the University of Delaware

Posted on Mar 2, 2012

Tim Vickery worked in the lab as an undergraduate and as a research assistant before going on to earn his PhD

in psychology at Harvard with Yuhong Jiang. Tim is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University with Marvin Chun. Tim just accepted a faculty position at the University of Delaware. Congratulations Tim!

New paper to appear in Cerebral Cortex

Posted on Feb 21, 2012

Congratulations to Jonathan Folstein on our new paper to appear in Cerebral Cortex:

Folstein, J., Palmeri, T.J., Gauthier, I (2012). Category learning increases discriminability of relevant object dimensions in visual cortex. Cerebral Cortex. [PDF]

A couple of recent papers from the CatLab

Posted on Jan 17, 2012

Purcell, B.A., Schall, J.D., Logan, G.D., & Palmeri, T.J. (in press). Gated stochastic accumulator model of visual search. Journal of Neuroscience. [PDF]

Folstein, J., Gauthier, I., & Palmeri, T.J. (in press). Not all morph spaces stretch alike: How category learning affects object perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. [PDF]

NSF Renews TDLC center grant

Posted on Nov 4, 2011

The Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (TDLC) recently received renewal of funding from the National Science Foundation with a five year $18 million grant. The TDLC, one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by NSF, provides core support for the Perceptual Expertise Network (PEN). PEN is co-directed by Palmeri and Gauthier, who also sit on the Executive Committee for the TDLC.

A story on the funding renewal appears here: http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2011/11/pen-grant-renewal/

Scientific Computing minor highlighted in Vanderbilt Engineering magazine

Posted on Oct 5, 2011

The new Scientific Computing program (Thomas Palmeri, co-Director) is highlighted in Vanderbilt Engineering magazine: Computing: It's Not Just for Computer Scientists and Engineers Anymore.

Mike Mack wins Jum Nunnally Dissertation Award!

Posted on Sep 20, 2011

Michael Mack is the 2011 winner of the Jum Nunnally Dissertation Award.

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. Mike's thesis was nothing short of excellent, and well deserving of this 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.

This makes the second CatLab PhD to win this prestigious award. Jenn Richler was co-winner of the award in 2010.

Journal of Neuroscience article featured in Research News@Vanderbilt

Posted on Sep 1, 2011

Our recent Journal of Neuroscience article entitled Neural basis of adaptive response time adjustment is featured in Research News@Vanderbilt: 
http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2011/08/new-insight-into-impulse-control/

Pouget, P., Logan, G.D., Palmeri, T.J., Boucher, L., & Schall, J.D. (in press). Neural basis of adaptive response time adjustment. Journal of Neuroscience.

New Grant from NIH

Posted on Aug 2, 2011

Palmeri, Logan, and Schall have been awarded a new grant from the National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, entitled Stochastic Models of Visual Search.

Recent papers from the CatLab

Posted on Jun 25, 2011

Schall, J.D., Purcell, B.A., Heitz, R.P., Logan, G.D., & Palmeri, T.J. (2011). Neural mechanisms of saccade target selection: Gated accumulator model of visual-motor cascade. European Journal of Neuroscience.

Richler, J.J., Gauthier, I., & Palmeri, T.J. (2011). Automaticity of basic-level categorization accounts for labeling effects in visual recognition memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Richler, J.J., Mack, M.L., Palmeri, T.J., & Gauthier, I. (2011). Inverted faces are (eventually) processed holistically. Vision Research.

Stephen Denton to join the CatLab

Posted on Jun 25, 2011

Stephen Denton will be joining the CatLab as a postdoctoral fellow this fall. Stephen earned his PhD from Indiana University with John Kruschke in 2009. His thesis was entitled Exploring active learning in a Bayesian framework. For the past two years he has remained at Indiana as a postdoctoral fellow with Rich Shiffrin and Rob Nosofsky. Stephen will be joining the lab in September.

Congratulations Dr. Mack!

Posted on May 21, 2011

On Friday May 20, Mike Mack successfully defended his dissertation entitled "The Dynamics of Categorization: Rapid Categorization Unraveled". Mike is moving on to a postdoctoral fellowship at UT Austin with Brad Love and Allison Preston.

VSS 2011 CatLab Posters

Posted on May 17, 2011

Michael Mack – The Dynamics of Categorization: Rapid Categorization Unraveled

Jonathan Folstein – Category learning causes differentiation of psychological dimensions in dimensional but not polar morphspaces

David Ross – Face Adaptation: Comparing Norm-­ and Exemplar-­Based Models

CatLab awarded Discovery Grant

Posted on Apr 19, 2011

Our lab has just been awarded a two-year Vanderbilt University Discovery Grant entitled "Online Web-based Experiments of Real-World Perceptual Expertise".

New undergraduate minor in Scientific Computing

Posted on Apr 5, 2011

Palmeri was part of a group that was a awarded an NSF grant (Revitalizing Computing Education Through Computational Science) to develop an undergraduate minor in Scientific Computing at Vanderbilt. The minor is now officially on the books: New Minor in Scientific Computing Launched.

It also has a web site: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/scientific_computing/

Students in the program in Scientific Computing are taught techniques for understanding complex physical, biological, and social systems. Students are introduced to computational methods for simulating and analyzing models of complex systems, to scientific visualization and data mining techniques needed to detect structure in massively large multidimensional data sets, to high performance computing techniques for simulating models on computing clusters with hundreds or thousands of parallel, independent processors and for analyzing terabytes or more of data that may be distributed across a massive cloud or grid storage environment.