TALKS
2025-2026

The group addresses questions, such as what’s the difference between a posed and a spontaneous expression? how fast can we perceive a face or an emotional expression?, what strategies do radiologists employ to detect breast cancer and is this skill trainable? how do clinical conditions, such as depression, autism, affect face recognition? To address these questions, researchers in the collaborative employ a variety of empirical techniques involving psychophysics, cognitive experiments, eye tracking, neural imaging (fMRI, EEG), and computer modeling.

Catch up on the 2025-26 DMC talk season here!

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September 10th, 2025

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Speaker: Oscar Solis (Evans Lab) 

Title: Neural Correlates of Visual Complexity and Image Memorability​

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Abstract: Humans have a remarkable ability to remember thousands of images (Standing, 1973). Not only does the semantic category depicted in the image contribute to this ability but also the idiosyncratic details that make exemplars of the same category distinct from each other (Evans & Baddeley, 2018). Previous work has shown that images that are perceived as more complex tend to be more memorable (Kyle-Davidson et al., 2025), suggesting that visual complexity could contribute to the detail component of visual long-term memory. Here I present work done up to date in our investigation of the neural correlates of this relationship using the Natural Scenes Dataset (Allen et al., 2022). This dataset consists of high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans from 8 participants who viewed thousands of photorealistic images during a continuous recognition memory task. We have run whole-brain correlational analyses between single-trial betas and metrics derived from these images:  complexity and memorability scores generated from human data (still to come) as well as predictions made by a range of computational models. We hypothesize that activity in medial temporal lobe and ventral visual areas will correlate with memorability scores (Bainbridge et al., 2017). We also predict that activity in early visual cortex and higher visual areas such as parahippocampal place area will be correlated with complexity scores (Zhou et al., 2023). By inspecting the overlap in correlation maps between these two features, we will identify the possible neural substrates that underlie the behavioural relationship between complexity and memorability.

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Link to Zoom recording of Oscar's Talk

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