People often remember visual information over brief delays while actively engaging with ongoing inputs from the surrounding visual environment. Depending on the situation, one might prioritize mnemonic contents (i.e. remembering details of a past event), or preferentially attend sensory inputs (i.e. watching traffic while crossing a street). I’ll show that population-level response patterns in early visual cortex can represent the contents of working memory concurrently with passively viewed sensory inputs.

Network Dynamics for Attentional Selection in the Primate Brain

The 10th Annual Bradac Memorial Lecture: The Language of Privacy Management

The human brain is understood to be composed of distinct regions with specialized functions. With increasing interest in functional networks of the brain, reliable ways to identify brain regions motivated by functional connectivities are needed. In this work, a scalable statistical method for estimating partial correlations is used to determine voxel-wise functional connectivity networks. Previously limited by the extreme dimensionality of the fMRI data, a recent development in undirected graphical model selection can speed up the network estimation significantly.

Two Axes of Subordination: How Immigration Shapes Racial Dynamics in the U.S.

Sex differences in range size and navigation are widely reported, with males traveling farther than females, being less spatially anxious, and, in many studies, navigating more effectively.  The Spatial Cognition and Navigation project is collecting data from the field and the lab to learn (1) why males range farther, and whether it varies across cultures,  and (2) whether gender differences in mobility explain gender differences in spatial ability.  We report on some of our results, with data from four forager-horticultural populations (Hadza, Twe, Tsimane, Shuar) and