Cognition

Title: Prefrontal cortical representations associated with learning multiple tasks

Nan Zhou, doctoral student in the Yu Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago

Title: From Shared Memories to Shared Reality

Jadyn Park, doctoral student in the Leong Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago

Title: What makes cognition costly?

Jake Embrey, Principal Researcher at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago

Title: Investigating environmental factors underlying sustained attention during adolescence

Nia Berrian, MD/PhD student in the Rosenberg Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago

Title: The Social Effects of Drugs

Harriet de Wit, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Chicago

This workshop will be a “blitz talk” by four graduate students in the Department of Psychology, University of Chicago. The speakers and titles are listed below:

Isabel Gephart (Rosenberg Lab): Overlooked in cognitive neuroscience: the impact of hormones on functional brain organization.

Madeline Sullivan (Gallo Lab): Subjective cognitive decline as an indicator of accelerated long-term forgetting in aging.

Elizabeth Gaillard (Norman Lab): Predicting emotions: Future thinking as part of the stress response.

Alfred Chao (Berman Lab): Connectome-based predictive modeling with graph neural networks

Time: 05/28/25 3:30 PM

Location: Biopsychological Sciences Building atrium

If you have any questions, requests, and concerns, please contact Nakwon Rim (nwrim [at] uchicago [dot] edu) or Cambria Revsine (crevsine [at] uchicago [dot] edu).

Title: Excluded Minds, Perceived Faces: The Interaction of Facial Trustworthiness Judgments and Social Exclusion on Emotion Expression Recognition

Sabina Raja, doctoral student in the Norman Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago

Abstract: Individuals rapidly infer social traits from facial features with minimal time, effort, or conscious deliberation. Among such inferences, trustworthiness judgments reflect a fundamental trait dimension of social evaluation. However, most existing work on facial trustworthiness has examined judgments made in neutral social contexts. In contrast, real-world social environments are often charged with rejection and negative affective states. One such potent social experience—social exclusion—influences how individuals process and interpret social information in their existing contexts, such as faces and emotions.
This two-study experiment investigates: (1) whether facial trustworthiness judgments are influenced by social exclusion, and (2) whether social exclusion interacts with trustworthiness judgments to influence emotion recognition. Contrary to predictions, results from Study 1 suggest that facial trustworthiness judgments remain stable following social exclusion. Preliminary findings from Study 2, which explores how social exclusion and facial trustworthiness judgments interact to shape recognition of different emotional expressions, will be discussed.

Time: 05/14/25 3:30 PM

Location: Biopsychological Sciences Building atrium

If you have any questions, requests, and concerns, please contact Nakwon Rim (nwrim [at] uchicago [dot] edu) or Cambria Revsine (crevsine [at] uchicago [dot] edu).

Title: The Visual Brain: From Lines to Memory

Carmen Pons, MD, PhD, Resident, Department of Neurosurgery, University of Chicago Medicine

Abstract: Artists have long observed that humans perceive dark features more easily than light ones, but the neural mechanisms behind this asymmetry remained unclear. My research investigates how the ON and OFF visual pathways contribute to this phenomenon. The ON pathway, responsible for processing light stimuli, shows luminance/response saturation that diminishes the salience of light targets—especially under optical blur—whereas the OFF pathway processes dark stimuli more reliably. These ON/OFF asymmetries help explain why darks are more perceptually salient and may underlie visual disorders such as myopia. The ON and OFF cortical organization that I have investigated serves as the foundation for higher-order visual maps, including orientation and face detection. Building on this work, I now aim to explore a new level of visual complexity: the neural basis of memorability.

Time: 04/30/25 3:30 PM

Location: Biopsychological Sciences Building atrium

If you have any questions, requests, and concerns, please contact Nakwon Rim (nwrim [at] uchicago [dot] edu) or Cambria Revsine (crevsine [at] uchicago [dot] edu).

Title: Synchronization of cortico-hippocampal networks supports flexible memory-guided behaviors

James Kragel, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Neurology

Abstract: Memory-guided cognition emerges from the dynamic coordination of specialized brain networks. Theta oscillations play a critical role in synchronizing the hippocampus with distributed cortical and subcortical regions, shaping how past experiences inform present and future behavior. In this talk, I will present a series of studies examining how theta oscillations facilitate communication between the hippocampus and other brain networks to support different memory-guided behaviors. Using intracranial electrophysiology, direct electrical stimulation, and behavioral paradigms, I will highlight how theta-driven network interactions contribute to visual exploration and flexible memory retrieval. By linking these oscillatory mechanisms to cognitive function, this work provides insight into how the hippocampus orchestrates adaptive behavior through network-wide synchronization.

Time: 04/09/25 3:30 PM

Location: Biopsychological Sciences Building atrium

If you have any questions, requests, and concerns, please contact Nakwon Rim (nwrim [at] uchicago [dot] edu) or Cambria Revsine (crevsine [at] uchicago [dot] edu).

Title: Convolutional Neural Networks as a Model of Human Intuitive Physical Judgments

Ren Calabro, doctoral student in the Leong Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago

Abstract: Humans reliably infer the physical stability of objects in everyday scenes, yet the cognitive mechanisms underlying these judgments remain unclear. Here, we test whether convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which capture statistical regularities in visual experience without explicit knowledge of physics, can provide a framework for understanding intuitive physical reasoning. We evaluated whether a CNN- specifically, a custom-trained Inception-v4 model trained on the same stimuli presented to human observers, using labels from physics simulations- could predict human stability judgments (N = 500) and the visual features humans attend to when making these judgments. The CNN’s predictions aligned closely with human choices, outperforming ground-truth predictions from physics simulations. Additionally, human eye-gaze patterns correlated with CNN-derived importance maps, suggesting that visual attention is directed toward features statistically predictive of physical outcomes. These findings support the idea that intuitive physics is shaped in part by experience-based visual heuristics and that CNNs can serve as a computational framework for uncovering the attentional and feature-based strategies underlying human judgments.

Time: 03/26/25 3:30 PM

Location: Biopsychological Sciences Building atrium

If you have any questions, requests, and concerns, please contact Nakwon Rim (nwrim [at] uchicago [dot] edu) or Cambria Revsine (crevsine [at] uchicago [dot] edu).