Eagleman
Lab Members
Baylor College of Medicine
Department of Neuroscience, Room T-111
One Baylor
Plaza
Houston, Texas
77030
Elyse Aurbach
Research Assistant
 eaurbach -AT- cpu.bcm.edu
Plasticity:
Neuroplasticity is the ability for your brain to dynamically change itself to adapt
to your experiences. One of my projects utilizes functional neuroimaging to track the changes in somatosensory cortex before and after an insult to body
plan as a means of examining plasticity in adult humans.
NeuroLaw:
The intersection between neuroscience and the law can be approached
from many perspectives. My current projects in this area focus around jury
decision making, influence of neuroscientific information in courtroom
proceedings, and differences in cognitive processing and neural signatures
in sex offenders and controls.
Selected
Publications/Presentations:
Burgund ED, Guo Y,
& Aurbach EL (under review). Priming for letters and pseudoletters in mid-fusiform
cortex: Examining letter selectivity and case invariance.
Gregory Bohuslav
UH Undergraduate
Research Student
 gbohusla -AT- bcm.tmc.edu
My
current projects mostly include research on dyslexia and timing. This
includes Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome, or SSS,
where black and white text are difficult to read (approximately 75% of all
Dyslexics have SSS). This difficulty is often in the form of distortion of
the letters on the page. The research on SSS is highly criticized by many
in the scientific and medical community. This criticism comes from the
experiments lacking statistically significant data, and an explanation for
the use on colored filters. These experiments used overlays or tinted
lenses. The tinted lenses and overlays are highly controversial in the
scientific community; many believe they have no real benefit to the user. I
believe these colored filters help at the very least people with scotopic sensitivity, and possibly people who have ADD
and other similar learning disabilities. The best way to explain what SSS
feels like is to look at two optical illusions which have internal
movement, then have one covered with a color overlay; the internal movement
should decrease or in some cases disappear. For many, it is also more
comfortable to look at a color and black image versus a black and white
image.
I am
also working on a timing recalibration experiment. Using a pneumatic
stimulus to mark the location of a hand moving through space at different
visual temporal delays.
Gregory Brown
Research Student
gbrown -AT- bcm.tmc.edu
Mingbo Cai
Rice Graduate Student
How we make decisions
about the temporal order of events in different modalities is not a totally
solved problem. I am pursuing plausible computational models that can
explain experimental data. I believe a computational approach is key to
link neural recording, behavior and models.
Sherry Cheng
UT Austin Research Student
Synesthesia is a condition
in which the stimulation of one sensory modality triggers a second
involuntary and automatic sensation not normally associated with the
stimulus. For example, in grapheme-color synesthesia,
seeing graphemes (letters and numbers) induces sensations of color. There
are many different forms of synesthesia,
including grapheme-color, music pitch-color, sound-taste, etc. An
open question is the relationship between the different types of synesthesia: if you have one type, are you likely to
have a different type? And if so, which one(s)? I am currently
looking at whether different synesthesia types
tend to co-occur, suggesting groups of possible underlying mechanisms.
Evan Delacruz
Computer Programmer
Robert LiKamWa
Computer Programmer
Melisa Moncure
Research Associate
Steffie Nelson
Graduate Student
 Snelson – AT- cpu.bcm.edu
Synesthesia is a perceptual
condition that manifests as a blending of the senses. Many synesthetes associate colors
with letters or sounds with textures, and these are the associations we are
looking to explore. From the neurological perspective, it is seems
that synesthetes are exploiting more neural
connections than non-synesthetes. Using
functional MRI scans, we are discovering what makes the synesthetic
brain unique in the way that it learns and stores information.
Selected Publications/Presentations:
Eagleman DM, Kagan AD, Nelson SS, Sagaram D, Sarma AK
(2007). A standardized test battery for the study of Synesthesia. Journal
of Neuroscience Methods. 159: 139-145.
Vani Pariyadath
Graduate
Student
 vanip – AT – cpu.bcm.edu
How we
perceive time is still an unsolved question in neuroscience. We do not
understand, for instance, why time, or more specifically duration,
sometimes appears to fluctuate in its subjective rate of passage. We have
shown that a more predictable stimulus, such as a repeated one, will appear
to be contracted in duration as compared to an unpredictable stimulus. We
hypothesize that this duration contraction is driven by the neural
phenomenon of repetition suppression – the diminishment of the neural
response to a stimulus with repetition. We have developed an experimental
paradigm in which the perceived duration of a brief stimulus can be
measured rapidly. Currently, we are using fMRI to
examine how neural repetition suppression parallels duration contraction
with this experimental paradigm.
Selected
Publications/Presentations:
Sereno
AB, Jeter CB, Pariyadath V and Briand KA
(2006). Dissociating Sensory and Motor Components of Inhibition of Return, the
Scientific World Journal, 6, 862–887, 2006.
Pariyadath V and Eagleman DM (2007) The effect
of predictability on subjective duration, PLoS One.
Srinivasan
N & Pariyadath V (2008). Dissecting the Frog: Computational
Approaches to Humor Perception, Srinivasan, N., Gupta, A.K., & Pandey, J. (Eds.). Advances in Cognitive Science, Sage
Publications.
Srinivasan
N & Pariyadath V
(2008). GraPHIA: A Computational Model for
Identifying Phonological Jokes, Cognitive Processing.
Pariyadath V & Eagleman DM (In press).
Duration illusions and what they tell us about the brain, In Advances in
Cognitive Science: Volume 2. Eds: Srinivasan,
Kar, & Pandey. Sage
Publications.
Pariyadath V & Eagleman DM
(In press). Brief subjective durations are contracted by repetition in the
absence of explicit temporal judgments, Journal
of Vision
Pariyadath V, Churchill, SJ & Eagleman DM
(Under review). “Why overlearned sequences are
special: distinct neural networks in the right hemisphere for ordinal sequences”
Eagleman DM & Pariyadath
V (Under review). “Is subjective duration a signature of coding
efficiency?”
Jyotpal Singh
Research Fellow
jsingh – AT – bcm.edu
The
current focus of my research is sex offender behavior and recidivism, juror
decision-making, criminal rehabilitation, and drug addiction and
crime. With sex offenders, our goal is to eventually contribute
useful knowledge about neural and behavioral correlates of sex offenders
which can then be incorporated into rehabilitation tools and
programs. We are currently designing a battery of tests for sex
offenders that we will administer through an external research program with
the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. With juries, we are hoping
to look at three main questions: how does evidence of violence effect
the brain and its decision-making; how do people view different types of
culpability-mitigating conditions such as brain tumors or fetal alcohol
syndrome; and, finally, how do different types of evidence, especially related
to scientific and neurological evidence, weigh with jurors. These
areas represent a small sample of the many areas in which neuroscience and
law intersect.
Selected
Publications/Presentations:
Eagleman
DM, Correro M, and Singh J (In press). Why Neuroscience Matters for Rational
Drug Policy, Stanford Law and Policy
Review.
Thomas Sprague
Rice Undergraduate Research
Student 
tsprague – AT – cpu.bcm.edu
How
does our rich, temporally-unified perception of the world arise from noisy
patterns of neural activity? To
understand this problem, I investigate different visual illusions of
magnitude and perceptual asynchrony to probe the underlying neural
computations being performed. By
manipulating the temporal relationship of stimuli to one another or the predictability
of a rapidly-changing stimulus, we can alter the perception of basic
stimulus features. I compare these
results to current models of time perception and visual perception to
determine how these manipulations influence our perception.
Selected
Publications/Presentations:
Sprague TC
& Eagleman DM (2008) “The perceived duration of a stimulus depends on
temporal context” Baylor College of Medicine Department of Neuroscience
Annual Forum, Galveston,
TX.
Sprague TC,
Jacobson JE, Eagleman DM. Perceived duration depends on temporal context.
In preparation.
Sprague TC
& Eagleman DM. Color-motion asynchrony depends on stimulus
predictability. In preparation.
Eagleman
DM & Sprague TC. The neural bases
of time perception. To appear in Oxford Companion to Time. In preparation.
Matthew Timberlake
BCM Medical Student
Lab Associates
Don Vaughn,
Entrepreneurial Collaborator
Karthik A. Sarma,
M.D., Neurologist, BCM
Lab Alumni
Shilpa Gandhi, Research
Assistant
Sara Churchill,
Research Assistant
Giovanni Piantoni,
Research Assistant
Rejnal Tushe,
Rice undergraduate research student
Chess Stetson,
Graduate Student
Keith Kline, Graduate
Student
Arielle Kagan,
Harvard undergraduate summer student
Wilber Wang,
Rice undergraduate summer student
Daniel Dascenco,
International summer student
Matthew Fiesta,
Summer research medical student
Deepak Sagaram, M.D.,
Graduate research assistant
Helen Vo,
Research Assistant
Josh Hesterman,
Rice undergraduate summer student
|
