Summer/Fall Recap
January 25, 2022
Hello again! Another brief update after a bit of a hiatus. It was quite a run for me on the latter half of 2021... We sold our house, packed up and moved across Canada, all while finishing and defending my dissertation. The move went pretty smoothly, in spite of a very shady point-person for our moving company, and we're grateful for in-laws who were generous enough to provide a place to crash until we could find our own place.
My major professional milestone was defending my dissertation. My defence talk went well thanks to the helpful rehearsal critiques from my Klein Lab colleagues, and I was pleased with the depth and breadth of discussion during the question period with my committee and my external examiner, Dr. Alan Kingstone. Mostly, I was pleased that the discussions on where my research should go next were really in line with some of the plans I have already outlined for my postdoc in the VASP and AP&P labs: a) what are the neural underpinnings of IOR, and b) how does it affect our behaviour in the real world?
I also managed to get another paper published, this one from my short tenure in the Krigolson Lab while it was based at Dalhousie. In this single experiment, we pitted participants against three virtual opponents in games of Rock-Paper-Scissors. We varied the win/loss/tie rate against each virtual opponent to measure the neural correlates in response to viewing one's opponent and to viewing the match outcome. We found that ERPs to the opponents' faces were modulated by win rate, but no differences were found in the ERPs to match outcomes as a function of the opponent. Our results are contrary to what one might expect for a reinforcement model associated with predicted reward, but rather demonstrate that the neural response to the opponent was encoding engagement level, as opposed to value relative to the anticipated outcome. This paper was published in a special issue at Games, entitled Psychological Perspectives on Simple Games and guest edited by my new departmental colleague at the University of Alberta, Dr. Ben Dyson.
Lastly, I finally became an official University of Alberta citizen on January 1, so I've gotten to enjoy about a month of being a postdoc thus far. I'm excited for what's in store, and hope to have more science to report in my next update!
Stay safe, and take care!
- RJ
My major professional milestone was defending my dissertation. My defence talk went well thanks to the helpful rehearsal critiques from my Klein Lab colleagues, and I was pleased with the depth and breadth of discussion during the question period with my committee and my external examiner, Dr. Alan Kingstone. Mostly, I was pleased that the discussions on where my research should go next were really in line with some of the plans I have already outlined for my postdoc in the VASP and AP&P labs: a) what are the neural underpinnings of IOR, and b) how does it affect our behaviour in the real world?
I also managed to get another paper published, this one from my short tenure in the Krigolson Lab while it was based at Dalhousie. In this single experiment, we pitted participants against three virtual opponents in games of Rock-Paper-Scissors. We varied the win/loss/tie rate against each virtual opponent to measure the neural correlates in response to viewing one's opponent and to viewing the match outcome. We found that ERPs to the opponents' faces were modulated by win rate, but no differences were found in the ERPs to match outcomes as a function of the opponent. Our results are contrary to what one might expect for a reinforcement model associated with predicted reward, but rather demonstrate that the neural response to the opponent was encoding engagement level, as opposed to value relative to the anticipated outcome. This paper was published in a special issue at Games, entitled Psychological Perspectives on Simple Games and guest edited by my new departmental colleague at the University of Alberta, Dr. Ben Dyson.
Lastly, I finally became an official University of Alberta citizen on January 1, so I've gotten to enjoy about a month of being a postdoc thus far. I'm excited for what's in store, and hope to have more science to report in my next update!
Stay safe, and take care!
- RJ
