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As a graduate student working with Justin Gardner one of my major projects has been to look at how we can use contrast and coherence to understand how the brain reads out from sensory representations during perceptual decision making.

Mapping the sensitivity of early visual cortex to motion contrast and coherence

I started this project by showing that we can jointly model the perception of contrast and motion coherence using neural responses in early visual cortex and presented that work at SFN 2016. The manuscript from this work is submitted.

Flexible readout of stable cortical representations support motion visibility perception

Using the sensitivity maps that we built in the first part of this project we then looked to understand how readout of motion visibility perception is performed. We are also preparing this manuscript for submission.

with Justin Gardner at Gardner Lab; Code; Stim; Data

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The point of no return in vetoing self-initiated movements

In 2013 I lived in Berlin and worked in the lab of John-Dylan Haynes on this project.

We have an intuition that we "commit" to a decision at a specific moment. Despite this intuition early neuroscience researchers found that brain activity becomes predictive of our intentions far in advance, sometimes up to 10 seconds. In this experiment we showed that in reality the point of no return, after which an action is guaranteed to happen, occurs only about 200 ms before motor activity. Until the point of no return the brain has not committed with no possibility of cancelling.

Birman, D.*, Schultze-Kraft, M.*, Rusconi, M., Allefeld, C., Görgen, K., Dähne, S., ... & Haynes, J. D. (2015). The point of no return in vetoing self-initiated movements. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201513569. *Equal author contribution. at hayneslab

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I am very interested in the idea of building better models to link human and non-human animal behavior as a way of better connecting physiological data from different model systems. We got interested in this project while looking at a set of monkey physiology data where the order of task training turned out to be critical to interpreting the results.

Comparing monkey and human learning

Birman, D., & Gardner, J. L. (2016). Parietal and prefrontal: categorical differences?. Nature neuroscience, 19(1), 5-7. at Gardner Lab.

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As a graduate student working with Justin Gardner my dissertation project is looking at whether we can understand what is usually called feature-based (or category) attention through brain mechanisms that are more classically associated with spatial attention. These projects are at the pilot stage.

Spatial attention as a mechanism for categorical attention

with Justin Gardner at Gardner Lab; Code; Stim; Data (available after publication)

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Cognitive neuroscience tutorials

Let's face it. We're awful at teaching cognitive neuroscience! When you learn about physics you get to play with kinetics, electricity, magnetism, and thermodynamics. When you learn about chemistry you get to blow things up! But for some reason we seem to think that students will get excited if we show them pictures and movies about psychology and call it a day.

In my time at Stanford I've invested a lot of work into building playful brain simulation tutorials about cognitive neuroscience. These tutorials help students re-discover classic experiments about the visual system. Brain.js (below) is the new interface to all of these -- but I keep a list of older tutorials here.

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Brain.js

Brain.js is the core simulation environment I have been working on. A demo version is available which allows you to record from V1 and MT (currently a WIP).

Teaching

Cognitive Neuroscience

PSYCH 50: Introduction to cognitive neuroscience (Winter 2016, Winter 2017, Winter 2018)

Instructor: Justin Gardner
Head TA: Dan Birman
TAs: Anna Khazenzon, Natalia Velez, Anthony Stigliani, Rosemary Le, Minyoung Lee, Lior Bugatus, Zeynep Enkavi, Guillaume Riesen, Mona Rosenke, Akshay Jagadeesh, Jon Walters
Undergraduate TAs: Emma Master, Stephanie Zhang, Kawena Hirayama, Henry Ingram, Storm Foley

NEPR 207: Cognitive neuroscience - first year seminar for neuroscience graduate students (Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018)

Instructors: Russ Poldrack, Justin Gardner
TA: Dan Birman

Statistics

PSYCH 252: Methods for behavioral and social sciences (Fall 2016)

Instructors: Ewart Thomas, Benoit Monin
TAs: Dan Birman, Stephanie Gagnon, Robert Hawkins

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Rock Climbing

Vertical rescue (Spring 2011, Spring 2012, Winter 2018, Spring 2018)

Sport leading and rappelling (clinics) (Winter 2018, Spring 2018)

Crack climbing (clinics) (Fall 2017)

Winter camping (Spring 2010, 2011, 2012)

Multipitch climbing: Red Rock (Spring 2012)

Multipitch climbing: Shawangunks (Fall 2011)