Team

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  Dr. Ian Charest
  Senior Lecturer
  Dr Ian Charest is a cognitive computational neuroscientist generally interested in high-level vision and audition. He leads the Charest Lab at the Université de Montréal, where he and his team investigate object recognition in the brain using neuroimaging techniques such as magneto-electroencephalography (M-EEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). His work makes use of advanced computational modelling and analysis techniques, including machine learning, representational similarity analysis (RSA), and artificial neural networks (ANNs), to better understand human brain function. The current topics of research in the lab include information processing in the brain during perception, memory, and visual consciousness when recognising and interpreting natural scenes and visual objects. The laboratory is currently funded by an European Research Council - Starting Grant (759432) to investigate object recognition, visual consciousness, with a focus on individual differences in brain and behaviour. We also recently received a Courtois Chair in fundamental neuroscience, with a focus on computational and cognitive neuroscience, and an NSERC Discovery Grant to further study the interaction between vision and semantics.

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  Dr. Jasper van den Bosch
  Postdoctoral Scientist
  Jasper studied Psychology and Neuroscience in Maastricht and Rome. He then worked on PhD research on multisensory integration in Frankfurt. He went on to do a postdoc with Patricia Kuhl in Seattle, and with Niko Kriegeskorte in Cambridge. He then joined the Charest lab in 2018. His research focuses on the interplay between semantic and perceptual representation, from a multi-sensory perspective.

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  Dr. Ludwig Barbaro
  Postdoctoral Scientist
  Ludwig studied medicine at the University of Pisa, and completed his Ph.D. in Cognitive and Brain Sciences in CIMeC, under the supervision of Clayton Hickey and Marius Peelen. His interests include real-world object recognition, visual attention and the way vision and motivation interact with each other. He is currently a postdoc in the CharestLab, where he has conducted a project on the effects of task-relevance on the neural representation of visual objects using EEG and fMRI.

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  Katerina Simkova
  Research Assistant
  Katerina completed a BSc in Psychology at the University of South Bohemia where she investigated the cognitive advantage in bilingual adolescents. Having an interest in brain-computer interfaces, she then enrolled in MSc course in Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics at the University of Birmingham. Katerina completed her MSc in 2019 and subsequently joined the Charest Lab in 2020 as a research assistant. She works with Dr Ian Charest on investigating the neurocognitive mechanisms behind conscious access in visual object recognition.

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  Dr. Adrien Doerig
  Visiting Scholar
  Adrien studied neuroscience and physics at EPFL, and completed his Ph.D. in Neuroscience there under the supervision of Michael Herzog. His interests include neural computations in recurrent networks, in particular for vision, and, more broadly, understanding how and when different computational properties emerge in neural networks. He also works on theoretical issues in consciousness science. Currently, is a postdoc with Tim Kietzmann at the Donders Institute, and is visiting scholar at the University of Birmingham and the University of Cambridge.

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  Daniel Lindh
  PhD Candidate
  Daniel studied Cognitive Science at Umeå University before completing his Research Masters in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam. He is currently in the end of his Ph.D. working together with Ian Charest, Kim Shapiro and Ilja Sligte in a joint Ph.D. programme between University of Birmingham and University of Amsterdam. During the past few years he has been investigating attention, working memory, and conscious experience. Specifically, he is using fMRI/EEG, neural networks and cognitive models to investigate how hierarchical information-flow (from low-level visual features to semantics representations) is processed when presented in a fast sequence, hoping to unveil the essential mechanisms for perception.

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  Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
  PhD Candidate
  Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand is completing a PhD in cognitive neuroscience under the supervision of Ian Charest (University of Birmingham, UK) and Frédéric Gosselin (Université de Montréal, Canada). His work is centered on the perceptual and brain mechanisms that support individual differences in visual representations and recognition ability, with an emphasis for high-level representations (faces & objects). He uses a combination of psychophysical techniques, brain imaging, and machine learning to probe the mental representations of individuals from a neurotypical population, super-recognisers, and “pathological” populations, including prosopagnosia, and individuals on the schizophrenia and autism spectrum.

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  Daniel Perez Zapata
  Daniel studied psychology at the University of Tarapaca (Chile) and completed a MPhil in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Queensland (Australia) under the supervision of Prof. Virginia Slaughter and Prof. Julie Henry. His current PhD project is supervised by Dr. Ian Charest and Prof. Ian Apperly, which is focused on how individuals understand cognitively pure coordination games (i.e., players actively try to align their responses to each other with no communication whatsoever). To achieve this goal, he is interested in building new social measures, and apply representational similarity analysis (RSA) in order to find out: whether people are able to coordinate with each other successfully in social scenarios, and whether they show individual differences in alignment agreements. This research might shed some light into how individuals understand online social interaction.

Alumni

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  Yifan Xu
  PhD Candidate
  Research: Cognitive Neuroscience
  emotions

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  Eva Bamps
  MSc Candidate
  Eva has an MSc in Psychology from KU Leuven and visited the Charest Lab from September 2018 until May 2019 for a research internship. During her stay, she worked on two projects investigating the representation of visual stimuli in the brain. Eva is currently completing a PhD at the Center for Contextual Psychiatry (KU Leuven) under the supervision of Prof Inez Myin-Germeys. She studies social withdrawal in adolescents' daily lives with the use of Experience Sampling Methodology. Her broad research interest is individual differences, both within and between persons, specifically how a person's environment can shape these differences and how this manifests in daily life.

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  Yuxuan Zeng
  MSc Candidate
  Yuxuan studied biological science at Sichuan University (China), and completed MSc in Brain Imaging and Cognitive Neuroscience at University of Birmingham, under the supervision of Dr. Ian Charest and Dr. Jasper van den Bosch. She worked on multisensory real-world object representations at the Charest Lab and really enjoyed her time there. She is now working as a research assistant in China and most likely will keep pursuing a PhD degree in high-level visual perception with neuroimaging and computational model as methods in the near future.

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  Xihan Jia
  Research Assistant
  Xihan studied social cognition at the University of Birmingham, supervised by Prof. Ian Apperly, and worked as research assistant in Ian Charest’s lab in 2019. She's now working in Peking University as research assistant and focuses on undergraduate development, interested in young adults’ emotion regulation for future research.

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  Subati Abulikemu
  Undergrad Research Assistant
  Subati did his undergraduate studies of psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Birmingham, where he investigated the conscious recognition of visual objects. He is currently studying Translational Neuroscience at the Imperial College London, and he is interested in brain connectivity, and the application of computational methods to improve the diagnostic precision of neurological and psychiatric disorders.

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  Charlie Wong
  Bsc Candidate
  I completed my Human Neuroscience Bachelor degree at the University of Birmingham. During my final year project, I was involved with the research of emotional categorization and multivariate pattern analysis using EEG in the lab. I was very fascinated by how we can link the brain process to behaviour by decoding brain signals recorded in EEG. I absolutely enjoyed the time in this research and this has really widened my knowledge in this field. In the future, I would like to get into clinical psychology and explore more on how to develop interventions for different psychological disorders.

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  Lara Oliel
  MSc Candidate
  Lara studied physiology and neuroscience at Sorbonne université (Paris, France), and psycholinguistics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris). She joined the Charest Lab for a 3 month internship during her Master's degree, and worked on linking brain and behavioral measures of visual object similarity. She is now a public school teacher in France (for children between 3 and 10 years old).

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  Dr. Sara Assecondi
  Postdoctoral Scientist
  Research: Cognitive neuroscience
  and Methods

Current projects and collaborations

Individual differences in brain representations

Everyone is unique, and one challenge of brain imaging is to develop new tools to better understand brain function in individual people.

Less Projects

We recently extended and replicated these fMRI results using decoding techniques applied to EEG data, and presented some preliminary results at the Vision Sciences Society conference.

Here is the poster that we presented there:
Revealing the temporal dynamics of individually unique object representations

Relating subjective experience to brain function

An additional aim of brain science, is to explain brain function and relate it to human behaviour. In the lab, we commonly use the multiple arrangements task [Kriegeskorte et al. 2012;Mur et al. 2013;Charest et al. 2014 ] to relate representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) constructed from brain activity patterns, to RDMs generated from this behavioural task.

To facilitate access to behavioural tasks like the multiple arrangements, together with Nikolaus Kriegeskorte and Jasper van den Bosch, we created an online platform, Meadows. Meadows aims to streamline the collection of behavioural data, allowing fast access to judgements for images, videos and sounds, in a few clicks. Here is the link to start your own experiments: https://meadows-research/com

Conscious access to visual objects

An additional focus of the lab, is to investigate higher-level cognitive processes related to attention and consciousness, in object recognition. This focus will be funded from January 2018 by an European Research Council Starting Grant for the next five years.

Here is the poster that Daniel presented at the Vision Sciences Society conference:
Categorical differences in the conscious access to visual objects