I am a graduate student in Dr. Daniel Goldreich's Tactile Research Lab.
I received an Hon. B.Sc. in Psychology with a Minor in Mathematics
& Statistics from McMaster University in 2010.
Research:
Broadly speaking, I am interested in the interface between sensation
and perception. Our brain perceives the world amid sensory uncertainty,
because sensorineural activity imprecisely represents the physical
environment and provides often ambiguous information. How the brain
interprets ambiguous information from the senses and translates it into
meaningful perception is what I aim to examine. Research has suggested
that the brain takes advantage of prior knowledge to enhance perceptual
resolution, a process that could be neatly modelled in terms of the
Bayesian inference framework.
The Bayesian inference perceptual model views perception as a series of
unconscious Bayesian inferences: the brain automatically incorporates
prior expectations with present sensorineural activities to generate
the most probable posterior perceptual image. This inferential process
helps the brain to compensate for sensorineural imprecision; however,
when prior expectations are violated by rare physical events, the
inferential process could lead to perceptual illusions.
My current project pertains to tactile adaptation and the perceptual
illusions it induces. Adaptation-induced spatial and orientational
illusions such as the tilt after effects have been extensively studied
in vision, but they are rarely investigated and poorly understood in
the tactile modality. Tactile illusions provide cues about how
the brain expects and interprets tactile information presented by
sensorineural activities as the brain adapts to previous tactile
stimuli. Using psychophysical experimentation and Bayesian modelling, I
hope to unpack tactile illusions and to tackle the sensorineural
encoding and decoding processes that underlie tactile adaptation.
Before I joined the Tactile Research Lab, I did my undergraduate
Honours thesis in Dr. Bruce Milliken's Attention & Memory Lab. I
examined how selective attention can qualitatively alter perceptual
priming effects through modulating episodic memory retrieval and
integration. I also conducted independent studies in Dr. William Sulis'
Collective Intelligence Lab and in Dr. Allison Sekuler's Vision and
Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.