Serences Lab @ UCSD

Welcome to the Perception and Cognition Lab at the University of California, San Diego. 

We are based in the Department of Psychology and participate in the Neuroscience Graduate Program.

Our research focuses on understanding how behavioral goals influence perception, decision making, and memory. To investigate these questions, we employ a combination of psychophysics, modeling, and neuroimaging techniques (fMRI and EEG) in human subjects. 

Recent publications

• Janna's paper suggests that more perceptual similarity during encoding leads to more interference, but retaining perceptual information in WM incurs little cost (consistent with predictions from modelling work) [Attention, Perception and Psychophysics][pdf]

• Sirawaj has a new paper on the relationship between attention, visual appearance and response bias [Journal of Neuroscience][pdf] 

• Sawetsuttipan et al (from Sirawaj's group in Thailand) systematically examine interactions between task difficulty and attentional modulations of visually evoked response [Journal of Neuroscience][pdf])  

• Tim's paper on serial dependence effects in visual cortex accepted at PLoS Biology - attractive biases in behavior despite repulsive adaptation in visual cortex [journal website (open), osf data and code]. Accompanying primer by David Whitney, Mauro Manassi and Yuki Murai [here].  

• Maggie and Rosanne's paper on the strategic reconfiguration of working memory representations from sensory to motor-like codes accepted at eLife [journal website (open), OSF data & code]

• Sunyoung's new paper on the relative precision of bottom-up and top-down modulations in early and mid/high level visual areas accepted at the Journal of Neurophysiology ([pdf] [journal website] [OSF data & code]). 

• New paper from Chaipat and Rosanne on attractive and repulsive biases in working memory accepted at JEP:General ([pdf] [psyarxiv link] [OSF data & code])

• Kirsten's new paper on distractor history effects in early visual cortex accepted at the Journal of Neuroscience ([pdf] [OSF data & code] [journal website] [pre-print link])

• Vy's new paper on similar (and dissimilar) codes for working and long term memory accepted at Cerebral Cortex ([pdf] [OSF data & code] [journal website] [pre-print link])

• Maggie's new paper on the origin of cardinal biases using CNNs accepted at JOV (journal website (open)) 

Resources

• LAB WIKI (login required)