Events

IBACS End-of-Year Event 5/7/25

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*** Details will be shared here as plans are finalized ***

Registration is now open for the 2025 Institute for the Brain & Cognitive Sciences (IBACS) End-Of-Year Event on Wednesday, May 7th from 9am-1:30pm. The deadline to register and sign-up for a poster is Friday, April 25th. This celebration of the 10th anniversary of IBACS will be in-person in the Rome Ballroom on the Storrs Campus. Affiliated faculty and graduate students will give 5-minute talks on their IBACS-funded research, and we will hear brief presentations from figures in the administration. Anyone who has received IBACS support should plan to participate.

May 7 Schedule  

9:00AM – Welcome & Opening Remarks from UConn Leadership 
IBACS Directors
Inge-Marie Eigsti, Director of Research
Emily Myers, Director of Training
John Salamone, Director of Outreach and Communications
Presentation of the Phillip P. Smith Award in Cognitive Science
Gerry Altmann, Psychological Sciences
UConn Administrators
Anne D’Alleva, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Pamir Alpay, Vice President for Research, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship
Ofer Harel, Dean for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Derek Houston, Department Head of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences
9:30AM – Data Blitz (5-minute talks) 
Natale Sciolino, Physiology and Neurobiology
Matthew Frost, UCH Neuroscience
Heather Read, Psychological Sciences (BNS)
Whit Tabor, Psychological Sciences (PAC)
Yulia Bereshpolova, Psychological Sciences (BNS)
Pengyu Zong, UCH Calhoun Cardiology Center
Jun Yan, Statistics
Hannah Mechtenberg, Psychological Sciences (PAC)
Kelly Mahaffy, Psychological Sciences (DEV)
Wesley Leong, Psychological Sciences (PAC)
10:30AM – Keynote Talks (30-minute talks)
James Li, Genetics and Genome Sciences
James Magnuson, Psychological Sciences (PAC)
11:30PM – Closing Remarks
11:45PM – Poster Session & Lunch
 1:30PM  – End Time

Poster Session Information: The poster session will provide an opportunity for IBACS affiliates to network with the broader community. This year, we welcome project posters in addition to lab posters. We hope you will use this opportunity to highlight the research you are most excited to share with our broader community. Re-using recent conference posters or a lab poster printed for last year’s event is welcome.

Register and sign up for a poster by Friday, 4/25: https://forms.office.com/r/KPtGDDn77F

Nominations for The Phillip P. Smith Award in Cognitive Science: Recognizing Vision and Innovation in the Study of Mind and Body are due on 4/14. This award will be presented at the End-of-Year Event. Please see below for the full details.

We hope you can join us! A more detailed program with talk titles will be shared at least a week before the event. Please forward this email to your lab members and share with anyone who may be interested. Thank you!

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Call for nominations: The Phillip P. Smith Award in Cognitive Science: Recognizing Vision and Innovation in the Study of Mind and Body

Phil Smith was a urologist at UConn Health during the earliest days of IBACS – his curiosity and vision led him to ask in what ways cognitive science might inform the relationship between the brain and the organs of the body whose regulation can at times be automatic and outside of conscious control, and at other times under seemingly full control of the conscious mind. Phil sadly passed away in 2022. His legacy continues through an ongoing research project across the Storrs and Farmington campuses. He brought together a band of “unusual suspects” – urologists, geriatricians, gerontologists, psychiatrists, cell biologists, and cognitive psychologists who are still working together today. In recognition of his vision, IBACS has created an award in Phil’s memory. The award consists of a crystal trophy inscribed with the recipient’s name and a design that captures Phil’s research into the relationship between brain and bladder.

IBACS seeks nominations for this year’s recipient of the Phillip P. Smith Award. Nominees can be students at any level, postdoctoral researchers, or pre-tenured faculty. Nominators should explain in what way the nominee has exhibited vision and innovation in respect of the relationship between mind and body (defining “body” to include physical aspects and systems of the body, and the “mind” to include anything that can loosely be construed as implicating cognition, emotion (and its regulation), human experience, and so on). We do not rule out any particular area or topic, so long as it is related to some aspect of psychological and bodily function (health policy, for example, that touches on such issues, the health and psychological sciences more broadly, and philosophy, as well as others, are all domains in which such vision and innovation might be expressed). A letter describing why the nominee is a worthy recipient of this award, as well as a copy of the nominee’s CV, should be sent to ibacs@uconn.edu by April 14, 2025.

LangFest 2025 – Save the Date!

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We are excited to announce that Language Fest 2025 will be held on the late afternoon and early evening of Wednesday, April 16th in Konover Auditorium (spoken program) and Bousfield Psychology Building Atrium (poster sessions).   

Language Fest is a university-wide research conference that welcomes the full cross-disciplinary community of language researchers at UConn for a day of sharing results, ideas, methodologies, and fostering future interdisciplinary collaborations. Researchers from all disciplines of the language sciences and at all career stages are welcome and encouraged to submit their work. The event is made possible with the support of the Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences (IBACS). 

This year’s program will feature a graduate student symposium showcasing the diversity of methodologies used to study language, a data blitz session, an undergraduate commencement speaker, and poster sessions. Further details about submission and registration forms will be provided soon.

For any questions about Language Fest, please e-mail: langfest@uconn.edu and visit our website https://languagefest.uconn.edu/.

We look forward to your attendance and participation! 

UConn LangFest Organizing Committee

Emma Wing

Jiabao Fan

Kaya LeGrand

Menghan Yang

Portia Washington

Briana Ashton

Mikayla Robinson

Melanie Stroud

Dr. Umay Suanda

COGS/ECOM Talk on 4/19: Dr. Psyche Loui

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COGS and ECOM are excited to announce a joint talk on 4/19 by Dr. Psyche Loui from Northeastern University. Psyche Loui, PhD, is a psychology and neuroscience researcher, a musician, Associate Professor of Creativity and Creative Practice at Northeastern University, and Director of the Music, Imaging, and Neural Dynamics Laboratory (MIND Lab).

Date/Time: Friday, 4/19/24 from 4:00pm – 5:30pm Eastern Standard Time

In-Person Location: McHugh Hall 305 

Zoom Option: https://uconn-edu.zoom.us/j/97306159796?pwd=ZHI1NTh1R1dPZTdYNS95U3hnN2QyZz09

Meeting ID: 973 0615 9796    Passcode: 391851

Talk Title: The Sciences of New Musical Systems, and Their Implications for Brain Health

Abstract: Music is one of life’s greatest pleasures. While abundant evidence points to the role of predictability (i.e. the knowledge of what comes next) in the experience of pleasure, little is known about how predictable musical features (e.g. melody, harmony, rhythm) come to be rewarding. I will present new work in my lab on behavioral and neuroimaging studies of the relationship between musical predictions and their reward value. Our behavioral studies test whether and how it is possible to acquire reward value solely from newly-formed predictions, by exposing participants to novel, acoustically-controlled musical stimuli with different statistical properties without extrinsic paired rewards. Our neuroimaging studies capitalize on activity of the dopaminergic reward system, and its connectivity to the auditory system, to test for individual differences in reward sensitivity from music. Results show that this reward sensitivity is robust but malleable (i.e. both a state and a trait), and lies at the heart of both active and receptive music-based interventions for a wide range of neurodegenerative disorders.

Meetings: If you are interested in meeting with Dr. Loui during the day or attending dinner in the evening, please email crystal.mills@uconn.edu. 

BIRC & IBACS Speaker Series: Dr. Andrew Jahn on 12/7

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Dear IBACS & BIRC Communities,

 
We are excited to announce a new talk series sponsored by BIRC and IBACS. Our first speaker will be Dr. Andrew Jahn at the Univeristy of Michigan. Andrew Jahn, PhD is a neuroimaging consultant at the University of Michigan’s UMOR Functional MRI Laboratory in the Radiology Department. Dr. Jahn teaches neuroimaging analysis, functional and structural connectivity, machine learning, and other topics related to cognitive neuroscience. He has hosted neuroimaging workshops at several research institutions across the United States, including the University of Washington, Michigan State University, Ohio State University, Harvard University, and others. His research focuses on the role of prediction within the medial prefrontal cortex, and how this applies to domains such as pain, cognitive control, and linguistic processing. He will give his virtual talk, Trends in Best Practices for fMRI Research on Thursday, December 7 via Zoom at 2:30pm ET. The attached flyer includes full details, including the abstract.  
 
Registration is required to attend this seminar. Please register here. We ask that you please use your university/institution email address so we can track attendance. Once you are registered, you will receive an email from Zoom with the meeting information.
 
If you have any questions, please email ibacs@uconn.edu.

11/10 COGS & SLHS Colloquium: Dr. Samuel Mathias

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The Cognitive Science Program and the Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences Department are co-hosting a talk on 11/10!   

Speaker: Dr. Samuel Mathias, Professor of Psychology from the Department of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School

Time & Location: 4PM, Friday November 10, 2023, in McHugh Hall Room 206

Talk Title: “Genetic and environmental influences on hearing, cocktail-party listening, and cognition”

Abstract: Everyday hearing requires solving the cocktail-party problem, or segregating and attending to the relevant parts of complex auditory scenes. There are huge individual differences in cocktail-party listening abilities. People with clinical hearing loss generally struggle with cocktail-party listening due to impaired basic auditory sensitivity; however, others experience similar difficulties despite having “normal” sensitivity. Conventional wisdom says that such individual differences are due to a combination of genetic and environmental factors, although the specific factors and their relative weights are poorly understood. This talk will describe preliminary work and future plans to identify specific genetic and environmental factors influencing hearing abilities, including basic auditory sensitivity and cocktail-party listening. We will also discuss how these abilities relate to cognition, with a view towards leveraging these relationships to better understand the distinct and shared etiologies of presbycusis, cognitive decline, and dementia.

Meetings: If you are interested in meeting with Dr. Mathias during the day before his talk or in dinner on Friday evening, please email Crystal: crystal.mills@uconn.edu. Thank you!

LangFest 2023

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We are excited to announce that Language Fest is making an in-person return for 2023, and invite you to join us on the afternoon of Wednesday, April 26th (event times TBD).

 

Language Fest is a University-wide research conference that welcomes the full cross-disciplinary community of language researchers at UConn for a day of sharing results, ideas, methodologies, and fostering future interdisciplinary collaborations. Researchers from all disciplines of the language sciences and at all career stages are welcome and encouraged to submit their work.  

 

Further details about submissions and registration will be provided in early-March 2023.

 

For any questions about Language Fest, please e-mail: langfest@uconn.edu and visit our website https://languagefest.uconn.edu/. 

  

We look forward to your attendance and participation!

Save the Date- IBACS Meet & Speak 2023

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We are excited to invite you to Save the Date for the IBACS 2023 Meet & Speak Event on Friday, April 28th from 10AM-3PM. This event will be held in the Konover Auditorium at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. 
The IBACS Meet & Speak will explore the diverse research of IBACS affiliated faculty and graduate students, and will provide an opportunity for cross-disciplinary networking. We hope you can join us; please check back here for updates!
Event Flyer: Meet & Speak 2023

COGS Colloquium: Dr. Naselaris on 2/24

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The Cognitive Science Program invites you to a talk on 2/24

 

Speaker: Dr. Thomas Naselaris, an Associate Professor from Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota.

Time & Location: 4PM, Friday February 24th, 2023, in Oak Hall Room 117. Light refreshments will be provided. 

RSVP Form 

Talk Title: “Why Do We Have Mental Images?”

 

Abstract: Everyone who experiences mental imagery is the world expert on the contents of their own mental images. We argue that this privileged perspective on one’s own mental images provides very limited understanding about the function of mental imagery, which can only be understood by proposing and testing hypotheses about the computational work that mental images do. We propose that mental imagery functions as a useful form of inference that is conditioned on visual beliefs. We implement this form of inference in a simple generative model of natural scenes, and show that it makes testable predictions about differences in tuning to seen and imagined features. We confirm these predictions with a large-scale fMRI experiment in which human brain activity was sampled while subjects generated hundreds of mental images. We speculate that ongoing mental imagery may impact the structure of noise correlations in the visual system, and present a preliminary analysis of the Natural Scenes Dataset that appears to be consistent with these speculations. 

Bio: Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the Medical Discovery Team on Optical Imaging and Brain Science at the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research. He is co-founder and currently Executive Chair of the Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience.

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COGS & SLAC Talk on 12/16: Jonathan Peelle

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The Cognitive Science and SLAC programs invite you to a talk on 12/16!

 

Speaker: Dr. Jonathan Peelle, an Associate Professor from the Center for Cognitive and Brain Health at Northeastern University.

Time & Location: 4PM, Friday December 16th, 2022, in the Dodd Center Konover Auditorium. Light refreshments will be provided. Please RSVP so we can order accordingly.

Talk Title: “Cognitive consequences of acoustic challenge during spoken communication”

Abstract: Everyday communication is full of acoustic challenges, including background noise, competing talkers, or assistive devices. How do listeners understand speech in the midst of this noise? Evidence from multiple sources is consistent with a shared resource framework of speech comprehension in which domain-general cognitive processes supported by discrete regions of frontal cortex are required for successfully understanding speech. These increased cognitive demands can be captured using behavior, pupillometry, and functional brain imaging. Although frequently studied in the context of hearing loss, these principles have broader implications for our understanding of how auditory and cognitive factors interact during spoken language comprehension.

 Bio: Jonathan is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies the neuroscience of human communication, aging, and hearing impairment at the Center for Cognitive and Brain Health at Northeastern University. He also has two podcasts: “The Brain Made Plain” where he interviews cognitive neuroscientists about their work, and “The Juice and the Squeeze” in which he and a co-host talk about different aspects of being in academia.

Meetings: If you are interested in meeting with Dr. Peelle during the day on Friday or joining the dinner, please email: crystal.mills@uconn.edu.