Vanderbilt Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory

Our research focuses on how we perceive, remember, and respond to the most relevant information in our complex environment.  To study how our brains perform these astounding feats we use a variety of methods.  These include measurements of behavior (manual responses and eye movements), the magnetic and electrical responses from the working brains of humans and nonhuman primates, neuroanatomy, computational modeling, and functional connectivity.

News:

•      Geoff has co-authored a book with Dr. Ashleigh Maxcey. In this book we attempt to pack most of what we know to provide guidance and tips about navigating a career in Pscyhology or Neuroscience. It is titled: From Start to Finish: A Practical Buide to Becoming a Scientist in Psychology & Neuroscience. It has advice for undergraduates through to tenured professors. It was released January of 2019.

•      Jason Rajsic got a faculty in Scotland at Northumbria University! Slangevar.

•      We are lucky to be joined by David Sutterer, a recent Ph.D from the University of Chicago. David is already doing cool work and we expect he will churn out a ton of awesome stuff.

•      Help us welcome Jason Rajsic as new postdoc in the laboratory. He comes to us from The University of Toronto. Looking forward to his continued productivity and great things.     

•     We had all of our grad students finish in 2016. So we are still aggressively looking for new graduate students (now in 2019). Please contact Geoff if you are interested (geoff.woodman@vanderbilt.edu).

•     Our lab just got its third concurrent R01 from NIMH (September 2016). This grant will fund work with Sohee Park's lab using brain stimulaiton and recordings of electrophysiology to understand the top-down control of cognition.

     •     Congratulate Josh Cosman on his fancy new job with Pfizer. He will be able to continue work with both nonhuman primates and humans, performing cognitive and neurophysiological testing of the hottest new drugs.

     •     Taha Bilge won our department’s award for the best TA, and Kei Fukuda won the award for the most outstanding postdoctoral researcher at our department’s Psychology Day 2016.  Congratulations guys!

     •     Kei Fukuda has accepted a tenure-track faculty position at University of Toronto. His lab and primary appointment will be on the Mississauga campus. Please join me in congratulating Kei. He will be missed!

     •     Rob Reinhart has accepted the offer of a tenure-track faculty position from Boston University. Join us in congratulating Rob in achieving the impossible of getting an R1 faculty job straight out of grad school.

     •     Rob Reinhart won our inaugural 2016 Posner Award for the study of attention. Rob’s 2015 PNAS paper (the first of two PNAS papers in 2015) combined behavior, electrophysiology, and brain stimulation to understand how our memories flexibly control visual attention.

     •     Kei Fukuda won our inaugural 2016 Shiffrin Award for the study of human memory. His work used electrophysiological activity to predict which objects people will remember hours later after they see each object for just a couple hundred milliseconds. This work has recently resulted in a patent filing.

     •     Josh Cosman won the 2015 Box Fox Award for the best postdoctoral researcher. Rob Reinhart won our department’s award for the best graduate student researcher.  Way to be gentlemen!

     •     Good press on Rob Reinhart’s work with Sohee Park’s group. They are finding that brain stimulation can normalize behavior and EEG activity in patients with schizophrenia.

    http://www.schizophreniaforum.org/new/detail.asp?id=2209

     •     February 2015: The lab got its second R01 from the National Eye Institute!  This work combines our electrophysiological work with the modeling expertise of Gordon Logan.

     •     Rob Reinhart had a cool paper published in PNAS.  Please check out this beautiful work.

Welcome to our Lab