MTS is the department’s Mind, Technology, and Society speaker series. It is hosted by a different faculty member each semester. Founded by a generous gift from Professors Robert Glushko and Pamela Samuelson, MTS brings researchers and industry professionals from across the globe to present a variety of interdisciplinary work in cognitive science. See our UCMerced CogSci youtube channel for videos of past MTS talks!
CIS graduate students, faculty, and staff, and all who are interested are invited! Members of other departments at UC Merced as well as the general public are encouraged to attend. (Note: current CIS Ph.D. students are required to attend MTS each semester in residence, to fulfill their COGS 250 course requirement).
Dr. Samaha's talk "This is Your Brain on Rhythm: How Intrinsic Neural Oscillations Shape Ongoing Visual Perception” will be 3-4:30pm in COB 116.
Abstract: One hundred years ago Hans Berger recorded the first electrical signals from the human brain in an effort to measure “mental energy”. Instead, the non-invasive scalp recordings revealed the presence of strong rhythmic neural activity in a frequency band around 10 Hz that was highly sensitive to visual input. This so-called alpha rhythm reflects the synchronous actions of millions and millions of neurons in the visual system. Yet despite the scale and prominence of this pattern of brain activity, the role of alpha oscillations in visual processing remains deeply mysterious, even a century later. In this talk, I will present work from my group exploring the connection between alpha oscillations and temporal properties of perception. We discovered that the specific frequency of an individual’s alpha rhythm is reliably predictive of the duration of temporal integration windows in vision and even of time perception itself, suggesting that alpha frequency might govern the temporal resolution of perception. Zooming in on single cycles of alpha activity further reveals the computational principles by which alpha activity shapes perception on a millisecond by millisecond basis. By combining EEG with brain stimulation (TMS) and psychophysical modeling, we show how alpha activity shapes visual feature processing at the level of the primary visual cortex, suggesting, perhaps, a thalamic origin of this rhythm. Collectively our work is beginning to shed light on the mystery of how the ever-present and intrinsic rhythmic dynamics of the human visual system shape our perceptual experience and abilities.
For more information or to sign up for email announcements, please contact the talk series organizer: cis-mts-lead@lists.ucmerced.edu.
