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
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.
Sherry Cheng
UT Austin Undergraduate Research Student
Sara Churchill
Research Assistant
Synesthesia:
Music-color synesthetes see colors when they listen to various
forms of music. Most recently, I have been focusing on analyzing data from
over 500 music-color synesthetes collected from
our online synesthesia battery. General and
individual trends within this population indicate what neural constraints exist this perceptual condition. I have also been
involved in designing and executing two fMRI experiments
that focus on completing the neural picture of synesthesia. In the first, we aim to pinpoint the
areas of the brain involved with processing learned sequences. Data from
our online battery has shown that learned-sequences are the most common
form of color inducing visual stimuli. In the second, we aim to test the
hypothesis that there is a functional connectivity between color processing
areas and learned sequence processing areas of the synesthetic
brain during real-time perception.
Time-Perception
Apparent motion is a well
established perceptual phenomenon in which flashing stationary stimuli can
cause the illusion of various types of motion given ideal spatial and
timing parameters. Previous work in our lab has indicated that repeated and
random stimuli persist differently in time. I have been looking at whether
repeated or random stimuli, used to generate apparent motion illusions,
require different timing parameters.
Shilpa Gandhi
Research Assistant
 skgandhi AT bcm.tmc.edu
Ultimately
my goal is to elucidate how timing deficits underlie mental disorders.
Schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and Parkinson's
disease patients commonly exhibit symptoms of impaired timing estimation
and interval timing, amongst others. Moreover, I believe that the psychotic
symptoms underlying schizophrenia and other illnesses may be due to the
brain's impairment in properly timing its commands and sensory feedback. I
think that we can create simple diagnostic tests for such disorders using
these deficits as markers. We can also determine the neurobiological basis
of the symptoms by doing clinical studies on these patient populations
wherein we determine the effectiveness of drugs on timing deficit symptoms.
Selected
Publications/Presentations:
Cannon DM,
Ichise M, Rollis D, Klaver JM, Gandhi SK, Charney
DS, Manji HK, Drevets
WC. Elevated serotonin transporter binding in major depressive disorder
assessed using positron emission tomography and [11C]DASB;
comparison with bipolar disorder. Biol
Psychiatry. 2007 Oct 15;62(8):870-7.
Roiser JP,
Cannon DM, Gandhi SK, Taylor-Tavares JV, Erickson K, Wood S, Klaver JM, Clark L, Zarate Jr CA, Sahakian BJ, Drevets WC. Hot and Cold Cognition in Unmedicated Depressed Subjects with Bipolar Disorder. In
review.
Mehwish Ismaily
Stanford Undergraduate
Research Student
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, 862887, 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.
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.
Srinivasan
N & Pariyadath V (In
press). GraPHIA: A Computational Model for
Identifying Phonological Jokes, Cognitive Processing.
Pariyadath V & Eagleman DM
(Under review at Journal of Vision). Brief subjective durations are
contracted by repetition in the absence of explicit temporal judgments.
Giovanni Piantoni
Research Assistant
giovanni
AT cpu.bcm.edu
Visual
illusions are the key to unravel the mechanisms underlying visual perception.
A remarkable case of visual illusion is illusory motion reversal (IMR, see an
example from Dr. VanRullen's webpage). For
most of the viewing time, a rotating wheel is perceived to move in the
actual motion direction, but occasionally (5-20% of the time) it appears to
rotate in the opposite direction. Previous research supports the view that
this illusion is the result of the competition between neuronal groups
encoding opposite motion directions. A recent EEG experiment indicates that
the likelihood that one of these neuronal groups will drive perception is
reflected in the oscillatory activity in the alpha (8-13 Hz) and beta
(14-30 Hz) frequency bands. We are currently setting up further
experimental paradigms to investigate this suggestive hypothesis.
Selected Publications/Presentations:
Piantoni G,
Kline KA & Eagleman DM (in preparation).
Oscillatory activity correlates with perception during illusory motion reversal.
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
Rejnal Tushe
Rice Undergraduate Research
Student
Lab Associates
Don Vaughn,
Entrepreneurial Collaborator
Karthik A. Sarma,
M.D., Neurologist, BCM
Lab Alumni
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
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