Haline Schendan

Teaching interests

Office Hours (Term 1 2011):   Tu 4-5 pm and Wed 12-1 pm or by appointment (email a request)

I teach on the following modules

Stage 1:   Psy 154 Tutorial.

Stage 2:  Psy 250 Skills Packages.

Research interests

·         Main aim:  Develop a neurocognitive theory from neural circuits to systems of cognitive decisions based on object memory under diverse visual and task conditions, including the roles of learning and spatial analysis, in healthy people across the life span and patients with brain dysfunction.

·         Approach:  To accomplish this, the research program integrates across several domains, all in the visual modality: perception, object constancy, long-term knowledge and memory (emphasizing representations for categorization, episodic recognition, and implicit memory), learning, and spatial cognition, and, more recently working memory and decision-making, which are intimately related to the other domains.

·         Methods:  Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and neuropsychological studies involving patients with brain dysfunction reveal the functional neuroanatomy. Electroencephalography and event-related potentials (ERPs) time cortical processing. These human neuroscience methods are combined to determine how, when, and where neural processes support specific cognitive abilities. Moreover, neurocomputational modeling facilitates theory development.

·         Issues:

·         How visual objects are processed, how knowledge and memory about objects are activated in the human brain during categorization, recognition, search, and repetition priming tasks, how conceptual knowledge about objects are embodied (grounded) in perception and action systems of the brain

·         How the brain achieves object constancy on cognitive tasks, focusing on the role of top-down processes and dorsal versus ventral stream contributions

·         Neural systems for implicit versus explicit, learning and memory in the visual modality, particularly the role of transfer appropriate processing of memory from a study (learning) experience to a memory task, the format of memory representations, and the role of top-down cognitive control, decision, and reasoning processes

·         Changes in neural systems for vision, learning, and memory with normal aging and age-related neurological disorders and in psychiatric disorders

UoP Research group membership

Conferences organised

Conferences organized:

1.      Primary organizer of 2008 Second Annual Conference for the Tufts University Initiative on Emerging Trends in Behavioral, Affective, Social, & Cognitive Neurosciences, Cognitive Neuroscience of Visual Knowledge: Where Vision Meets Memory.

2.      Co-organizer, 2007 First Annual Conference for the Tufts University Initiative on Emerging Trends in Psychology, Building Meaning from Language.

Symposia organized:

1.      Organizer and Chair, Symposium III on Visual Knowledge:  Emergence of a New Discipline That Synthesizes Vision and Memory Theory. 50^th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, November 21, 2009, Boston, MA. Selected by the Governing Board from competing applications.

2.      Chair and Organizer, Symposium 2 at the 47^th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR), Cortical Dynamics for Visual Knowledge about Objects: Where Vision Meets Memory. Savannah, Georgia, October 18, 2007.

Chairperson:               

1.      Chair of Human Cognitive and Perceptual Learning slide session #813 at Society for Neuroscience meeting, Washington, DC (November 19, 2008).

2.      Co-chair of Perception IV slide session 667 at Society for Neuroscience meeting, San Diego, CA (November 7, 2007).

Links
For more information about my research program, please see:
website for HESchendan