Psychology Colloquium: Dr Will Ngiam (University of Adelaide)

Dr Will Ngiam (University of Adelaide)Title: Multivariate decoding of visual attention and memory – is what we see, what we remember?
Abstract: The ability to select relevant information and maintain it in mind – our attention and working memory respectively in broad strokes – is central to perception and cognition. In hopes of better understanding of these processes, philsophers, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have been trying to model how inforation is represented in mind and brain.
My talk will focus on two deceptively simple questions: what is a visual object and how are they remembered? First, I will provide a brief overview of multivariate classification of neuroimaging data with machine learning – a trending analysis method that has shown promise in unveiling representations in the brain. I will present two EEG research projects using this method – the first involves understanding how the features of a moving object are remembered, and the second involves how our learning and experience influence how we represent items in mind.
Bio: Will is an alum of the School of Psychology, completing his undergraduate Honours degree here before his PhD with Alex Holcombe in 2019. He went abroad for his postdoc, working with Edward Awh and Edward Vogel at the University of Chicago, before recently returning back to Australia and joining the University of Adelaide as a Lecturer. Will has started the Perception, Attention, Learning and Memory (PALM) Lab, where he hopes to design novel psychophysical experiments to inform computational models of attention and memory and linking those models to patterns of neural activity – all in the hopes of better understanding human cognition.