Research & Graduate SchoolSkip to Current Interests | Publications | Previous Research Current InterestsI am a first year graduate student studying the Psychology at the University of Iowa. I'm specializing in Cognition & Perception, working with Professor Cathleen Moore. People live in a rich, dynamic visual world. To successfully act in our environment, our minds must have a reasonably accurate1, up-to-date representation of our surroundings. It's no easy problem: how does the visual system process, represent, then update large amounts of incoming visual information in a way that allows us to quickly make decisions and act? I hope to use behavioral, eyetracking, and neuroimaging methods to determine what information we use and how we use it to accomplish a functional map of our environment. There are many fields in visual science that contribute to this goal. In particular, I'm interested in object instantiation, representation, and correspondence; visual attention; and scene representation and visual search. 1 accurate: our visual measurements of the world are from photons that bounce off objects. There's no way to know, nor any requirement, that what we see is anything like reality. My preferred way to describe our mind's functional map, rather than "accurate representation," is "useful approximation." Sounds hokey, is epistemologically conservative.[ top ] [ updated 8/6/2011 ]PublicationsJardine, N. L. & Seiffert, A. E. (2011). Tracking objects that move where they are headed. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 73(7). doi:10.3758/s13414-011-0169-8 Grossman, E. D., Jardine, N. L. & Pyles, J. A. (2010). fMR-adaptation reveals invariant coding of biological motion on human STS. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 4(15). doi:10.3389/neuro.09.015.2010 [ top ] [ updated 8/6/2011 ]Previous ResearchFor a year and a half of my undergraduate years at University of California Irvine, I worked with Professor Emily Grossman and her Visual Perception and Neuroimaging Lab to determine how the human brain encodes biological motion, the kind of motion that looks alive. We placed people in MRI scanners and recorded their brain activity while they watched a series of animations of different actions, like walking or throwing, from either the same or different viewpoint. Our initial fMR-adaptation experiment found that the human brain area sensitive to biological motion generally doesn't care about stuff like the direction or location of an action nearly as much as it cares about the action itself. By the end of my time with the lab I had learned quite a bit about how the brain encodes human actions. After a total of four fMRI experiments and a significant review processes, our paper was published.
Working with Emily and her then-students (now doctors) John Pyles, Javier Garcia, and Steve Thurman was fantastic. I learned quite a bit about science, and visual perception. I had such a great time, in fact, that I wanted to do it all over again before applying to graduate school. So... I spent the next three years as a research assistant in Professor Adriane Seiffert's Perception, Attention, and Control lab at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. When I started working there in July 2008 I knew relatively little about behavioral studies of visual attention, but since then I've picked up a few things about how we keep track of moving objects. I've helped out the postdoctoral fellows and graduate students a bit collecting behavioral and eye-tracking data for their projects, and have worked on a few other experiments under Adriane's guidance.
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