April & May

Happy Summer! After a great semester finish with the impressive Brown Bag presentations by our first and second years, it's time to reflect on the many other end-of-semester accomplishments of our graduate students before we head into the full swing of summer. Read below to learn more about all of their new papers, recent conference presentations, and summer workshop and training awards!

New Publications

• Obasih, C. O., Luthra, S., Dick, F., & Holt, L. L. (2023). Auditory category learning is robust across training regimes. Cognition, 237, 105467. Read here.
• Hodson, A. J., Shinn-Cunningham, B. G., & Holt, L. L. (2023). Statistical learning across passive listening adjusts perceptual weights of speech input dimensions. Cognition, 238, 105473. Read here.

Publications: Submissions and In Preparation

• Xie, Y. & Feeney, B.C. (under review). Predictors and outcomes of support-seeking during stress discussions of older adult couples. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
• Oszczapinska, U., Seojun, J., Nance, B., & Heller, L. M. (in preparation). Typical sound level in environmental sound representations. (This work is related to the poster that Urszula just presented at ASA and will be submitted as a brief report.)
• Heller, L. M., Julien, M., Oszczapinska, U., & Smith, J. (in preparation). Neutral attributable sources alter the perceived cause of the sound. (This manuscript is compiling a series of studies that Urszula has been working on over the last year as part of the grant they received from the REAM foundation to study the underlying mechanism of misophonia. The studies examine how causal reassignment can modulate sound pleasantness.)

Conference Presentations and Talks

• Kumar, L. & Creswell, K.G. (June, 2023). Associations of state and trait empathy with daily alcohol use. Oral presentation in the symposium, “Novel Approaches to Studying Socio-Cognitive and Socio-Affective Processes in Alcohol Use and Alcohol Use Disorder,” at the 46th annual meeting of the Research Society on Alcohol, in Bellevue, Washington. (Lakshmi independently organized this symposium.)
• Kumar, L. & Creswell, K.G. (September, 2023). Acute effects of alcohol on empathy in a sample of heavy drinking young adults. Oral presentation in the symposium, “Recent advances in the study of social cognition and problematic alcohol use,” at the 19th annual meeting of the European Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism, in Graz, Austria. (Lakshmi was invited to give an oral presentation in this symposium.)
• Urszula Oszczapinska presented a poster at Acoustical Society of America entitled, "Typical sound level in environmental sound representations," with co-authors Bridget Nance, Seojun Jang, and Laurie M. Heller. (This was for consideration of the best student poster award in Physiological and Psychological Acoustics.)
• Abhishek Dedhe presented a poster at the annual Vision Sciences Society meeting entitled, "Inductive biases of children and adults in a visual patterning task," with co-authors Steven T. Piantadosi and Jessica F. Cantlon.
• Maria Chroneos presented her first conference talk at the annual Vision Sciences Society meeting entitled, "Sinusoidal smooth pursuit after childhood hemispherectomy," with co-authors Shawn Willett, Sophia Robert, J. Patrick Mayo, and Marlene Behrmann.
• Max Kramer presented a poster at the Vision Sciences Society meeting entitled, "Examining adolescent ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOTC) using stereotactic EEG," with co-authors Vladislav Ayzenberg, Sophia Robert, Michael C. Granovetter, Zhengjia Wang, Christina Patterson, William Welch, and Marlene Behrmann.
• Sophie Robert presented a poster at the annual Vision Sciences Society meeting entitled, "Probing the neural plasticity of space- and object-based attentional processing in childhood hemispherectomy," with co-authors Michael C. Granovetter, and Marlene Behrmann.

Summer School, Training Awards, and Fellowships

• Kim Nestor was awarded the CNBC Career Development Award to attend a summer training program, the Mediterranean School of Complex Networks, in Catania, Italy this June.
• Kim Nestor was also awarded CIFAR’s Inclusive AI Scholarship to attend the CIFAR’s Deep Learning + Reinforcement Learning summer training program in Montreal, Canada this July.
• Abhishek Dedhe was awarded a travel award to present a poster in a fully-funded workshop at the Computational Summer School on Modelling Social and Collective Behavior (COSMOS) in Konstanz, Germany.
• Asal Yunusova received CMU's Center for Machine Learning and Health (CMLH) Fellowship in Digital Health Innovation for her project "Digital Mindfulness Training for Adolescents with Irritable Bowel Syndrome".

Other News

• Urszula successfully collected pupil data to analyze whether there is a unique pupil signature when individuals listen to disgusting sounds compared to other emotional sounds (e.g., sad sounds, happy sounds). They are in the process of analyzing that data, so hopefully more updates in the near future!
• Congratulations to the first and second years for successfully presenting their Brown Bags to the entire department!

Spring is here! Before you start gearing up for the last two months of the semester (gasp), please take the time to read through the latest updates on the accomplishments of our graduate students. Many new publications, grant submissions, awards, and other exciting developments!

New Publications

• Dedhe, A. M., Clatterbuck, H., Piantadosi, S. T., & Cantlon, J. F. (2023). Origins of Hierarchical Logical Reasoning. Cognitive Science, 47(2), 13250.
• Kramer, M. A., Hebart, M. N., Baker, C. I., Bainbridge, W. A. (in press). The features underlying the memorability of objects. Science Advances.

• Kumar, L., Ringwald, W. R., Wright, A. G. C., Creswell, K. G. (in press). Associations of state and trait empathy with daily alcohol use. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research

• Horner, F. S., Helgeson, V.S., & Korytkowski, M. (in press). Links of positive affect and stress to HbA1c: A prospective longitudinal study. Journal of Behavioral Medicine.
• Dedhe, A. M., Piantadosi, S. T., & Cantlon, J. F. (in press). Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Recursive Pattern Processing. Cognitive Science.

Paper Submissions

• Wang, A.Y., Kay, K., Naselaris, T., Tarr, M. J., & Wehbe, L. (submitted). Joint natural language and image pre-training builds better models of human higher visual cortex.
• Luo, A. F., Wehbe, L., Tarr, M.J., & Henderson, M. M. (submitted). Neural selectivity for real-world object size in natural images.
• Zhou, Y., Tarr, M. J., & Yurovsky, D. (submitted). Quantifying the roles of visual, linguistic, and visual-linguistic complexity in verb acquisition.

Grant Submissions

• Asal Yunusova will be submitting a grant proposal, "Digital Mindfulness Training for Adolescents with Irritable Bowel Syndrome", to CMU's Center for Machine Learning and Health (CMLH) for their Fellowship in Digital Health Innovation!
• Fiona Horner submitted an F31 grant application entitled, “Time-varying psychosocial influences of blood glucose among adults with type 1 diabetes."
• Maria Chroneos submitted an F30 grant application entitled, "Characterizing Eye Movements after Pediatric Cortical Resection: Neural Bases and Cognitive Implications."

Conference Presentations

• Pierre just presented a poster on his fMRI project at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting in San Francisco from March 25-28. 
  • Gianferrara, P., Betts, S., Fincham, J., & Anderson, J. (2023). Cortical and cerebellar contributions to sensorimotor learning across speeds in a finger pressing task. Cognitive Neuroscience Society.
• Yuxi presented a poster at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) annual convention in February and also presented this work in a data blitz for this project at the Close Relationships Pre-Conference meeting.
  • Xie, Y. & Feeney, B. C. (2023). Bidirectional pathways linking daily partner interactions to sleep quality in older adult couples. Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
  • This project was also accepted for a poster presentation at the SLEEP conference in June 2023.
• Abhishek had a poster presentation accepted for the Vision Sciences Society meeting in St. Pete's Beach this May. 
  • Dedhe, A. M., Piantadosi, S. T., & Cantlon, J. F. (2023). Inductive Biases of Children and Adults in a Visual Patterning Task. Vision Sciences Society.

Awards

• Lakshmi Kumar and Fiona Horner were both awarded the Bobby Klatzky Graduate Student Publication award for excellent first author publications.
• Fiona and Roderick were both awarded the Dick Hayes Service Award by the Psychology Department.
• Phoebe was awarded the Herbert Simon Teaching Award by the Psychology Department
• Phoebe was also the winner of the 2023 Graduate Student Teaching Award for Carnegie Mellon University.

Other News

• Shout out to the dedicated and inspiring grad writing group who gathers to buckle down and put words to page.
• Austin Luor is cruising on his third year review paper and is in the home stretch in completing a big manuscript.
• Jenah Black responded to reviewer comments on her first grad school manuscript.
• Alana Hodson had terrific reviews from Cognition on a manuscript titled, "Statistical learning across passive listening adjusts perceptual weights of speech input dimensions."
• Tim Murphy has been crushing dissertation writing and data collection.
• Chisom Obasih had enthusiastic and constructive reviews from Cognition on a manuscript titled "Auditory Category Learning is Robust Across Training Regimes."
• Austin Luor landed the 2023 Summer Research and Measurement Sciences (RMS) internship program for graduate students at Education Testing Services (ETS) .

Welcome back from winter break! I hope the restorative effects of holiday time and cozy weather have carried forward into a strong start to the Spring semester. Before the little layer of snow we got today melts, please have a read through the most recent accomplishments of our graduate students below ~

Paper Submissions & Publications

• Gianferrara, P., Betts, S., & Anderson, J. (under review). Periodic tapping mechanisms of skill learning in a fast-paced video game. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
• Murphy, T., Nozari, B., & Holt, L. (under review). Transfer of statistical learning from passive speech perception to speech production. Psychonomics Bulletin & Review. Read the preprint here.
• Tim's study found that short-term changes in participants' speech productions correspond to short-term changes in their perception of speech. While it is known that statistical learning drives changes in speech perception, the corresponding changes they observed in speech production are novel. The experimental paradigm detailed in this paper has the potential to answer a number of questions about how speech perception and production are linked in the brain.
• Robert, S., Ungerleider, L., & Vaziri-Pashkam, M. (2023). Disentangling object category responses driven by dynamic and static visual input. Journal of Neuroscience, 43 (4) 621-634. DOI.
• Sophie's study was featured in the journal's This Week in the Journal, and was also featured in a Dietrich College press release, which was picked up by some news outlets and even translated into Spanish and French. 

  Conference Presentations and Talks

• Kim Nestor had an abstract accepted for the annual Organization for Human Brain Mapping meeting entitled, "Phasic recruitment of basal ganglia and cerebellum in shifts of cortical modularity," with co-authors J. Rasero, R. Betzel, A. Gerlach, P. Gianaros, and T. Verstynen.
• Data from Austin Luor's first/second year projects were invited as a podium presentation at the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. The talk will be called, "Statistical regularities across task-irrelevant dimensions impact auditory decisions," and has co-authors Sahil Luthra, Barb Shin-Cunningham, Adam Tierney, Fred Dick, and Lori Holt.
• Maria Chroneos had an abstract accepted for the annual Vision Sciences Society meeting entitled, "Sinusoidal smooth pursuit after childhood hemispherectomy," with co-authors Shawn Willett, Sophia Robert, J. Patrick Mayo, and Marlene Behrmann.
• Max Kramer had an abstract accepted for the annual Vision Sciences Society meeting entitled, "Functional contributions of the dorsal pathway to shape perception: evidence from intracranial recording," with co-authors Vlad Ayzenberg, Zhengjia Wang, Christina Patterson, and Marlene Behrmann.
• Sophie Robert had an abstract accepted for the annual Vision Sciences Society meeting entitled, "Probing the neural plasticity of space- and object-based attentional processing in childhood hemispherectomy," with co-authors Michael Granovetter, Christina Patterson, and Marlene Behrmann.

Professional Development

• Kim Nestor applied to the Merck's Innovation Cup summer training program to be a part of the machine learning team.

Other News

• Max Kramer had a major breakthrough in his development of a novel analysis pipeline for intracranial recording data and has localized category selective electrodes in his first patient!

A recent alumnus from our graduate program, Casey Roark '19, has just accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of New Hampshire!

Congratulations to Urszula Oszczapinska and Austin Luor for successfully completing their Brain Bags for the CNBC 3rd year requirement!


CMU Psychology does "White Elephant + Ugly Sweater Party" to get the holiday spirit going and celebrate the beginning of Winter Break!

The Behrmann Lab goes skiing + snowboarding to take advantage of some fresh (and not so fresh) snow upon returning from the break. Photo from après-ski brunch.

Congratulations to everyone for their many achievements so far this semester. Looking forward to seeing you at one of the department socials. Happy Beginning of Spring!