Summer PostDoc News

It's my pleasure to introduce a new newsletter series focusing on another important group of trainees in our department: ~PostDoc news~! Dr. Sahil Luthra, a post-doctoral researcher in Dr. Lori Holt's lab, and I will be bringing you bimonthly updates on the most recent accomplishments of the postdocs associated with CMU Psychology. Read below to learn about their research progress this summer!

New Publications

• Aulet, L. S. & Lourenco, S. F. (2022). A theory of perceptual number encoding. Psychological Review.
• Aulet, L. S. & Lourenco, S. F. (2022). No intrinsic number bias: Evaluating the role of perceptual discriminability in magnitude categorization. Developmental Science, e13305.
• Ayzenberg, V., & Behrmann, M. (2022). The dorsal visual pathway represents object-centered spatial relations for object recognition. Journal of Neuroscience, 42(23), 4693-4710.
• Ayzenberg, V., & Lourenco, S. (2022). Perception of an object’s global shape is best described by a model of skeletal structure in human infants. eLife, 11 , e74943.
• Cranford, E. A., Jabbari, S., Ou, H.-C., Tambe, M., Gonzalez, C., & Lebiere, C. (2022). Combining machine learning and cognitive models for adaptive phishing training. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual Meeting of the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling. Toronto, CA. https://mathpsych.org/presentation/829
• Dutcher, J.M., Lederman, J., Jain, M., Price, S., Kumar, A., Villalba, D.K., Tumminia, M.J., Doryab, A., Cohen, S., Creswell, K.G., Mankoff, J., Dey, A., & Creswell, J.D. (In Press). Lack of Belonging Predicts Depressive Symptomatology in College Students. Psychological Science.
• Dutcher, J.M. (In Press). Brain Reward Circuits Promote Stress Resilience and Health. Current Directions in Psychological Science.
• Henderson, M.M., Rademaker, R.L., & Serences, J.T. (2022). Flexible utilization of spatial- and motor-based codes for the storage of visuo-spatial information. eLife.

Paper Submissions 

• Cranford, E. A., Ou, H.-C., Gonzalez, C., Tambe, M., & Lebiere, C. (under review). Accounting for uncertainty in deceptive signaling for cybersecurity. 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
• Cranford, E. A., Gonzalez, C., Aggarwal, P., Cooney, S., Tambe, M., & Lebiere, C. (under review). Modeling individual differences for decisions from experience. Topics in Cognitive Science.
• Henderson, M.M., Tarr, M.J., & Wehbe, L. (under review). Low-level tuning biases in higher visual cortex reflect the semantic informativeness of visual features. bioRxiv.
• Lebiere, C., Cranford, E. A., Aggarwal, P., Cooney, S., Tambe, M., & Gonzalez, C. (under review). Cognitive modeling for personalized, adaptive signaling for cyber deception. In T. Bao, M. Tambe, & C. Wang (Eds.), Cyber Deception. Springer Nature.

Preprints

• Jain, N., Wang, A., Henderson, M.M., Lin, R., Prince, J.S., Tarr, M.J., & Wehbe, L. (2022). Food for thought: selectivity for food in human ventral visual cortex. bioRxiv.
• Jinsi, O., Henderson, M.M., & Tarr, M.J. (2022) Why is human vision so poor in early development? The impact of initial sensitivity to low spatial frequencies on visual category learning. bioRxiv.

Grants and Awards

• Janine Dutcher received a K01 grant from the NIH, entitled “White Matter and Stress Reduction Effects of Mindfulness Training.”
• Sahil Luthra received an F32 National Research Service Award (NRSA) from the NIH, entitled “Mechanisms of auditory selective attention for speech and non-speech stimuli.” This work will be conducted in collaboration with Drs. Lori Holt and Fred Dick (University College London).
• Vibha ViswanathanF32 National Research Service Award (NRSA) from the NIH, entitled “Flexible representation of speech in human auditory cortex.” This work will be conducted in collaboration with Drs. Lori Holt and Taylor Abel (University of Pittsburgh).

Conference Presentations & Talks 

• Henderson, M.M., Tarr, M.J., & Wehbe, L. (2022). Informative associations between feature, spatial, and category selectivity in human visual cortex. Poster at Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, San Francisco, CA. https://doi.org/10.32470/CCN.2022.1043-0
• Henderson, M.M., Tarr, M.J., & Wehbe, L. (2022). Interpretable mid-level encoding models of human visual cortex reveal associations between feature and semantic tuning for natural scene images. Poster at Vision Sciences Society meeting, St. Pete Beach, FL.
• Luo, A., Wehbe, L., Tarr, M.J., & Henderson, M.M. (2022). The Neural Representation of Real-World Object Size in Natural Images. Poster at Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, San Francisco, CA. https://doi.org/10.32470/CCN.2022.1136-0

Congratulations, PostDocs! Stay tuned for our next PostDoc Newsletter covering September and October!