Lots of good news!

/

Jody is honoured be the 2025 recipient of the Davida Teller Award from the Vision Sciences Society.

Congratulations to Dr. Michaela Kent for successfully defending her PhD thesis in Neuroscience, “From faces to minds: Exploring socio-cognitive development with fNIRS”. Michaela will be continuing as a postdoc in the lab as she writes up publications from her thesis.

Congratulations to MSc student Olivia Ipwanshek for recieving a Canada Graduate Scholarship — Master’s award!

Congratulations to Emiko Muraki for receiving an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship to work in the lab. Emiko will be joining the lab in July to study hand actions in individuals with aphantasia.

Welcome to Rieko Osu, a visiting scholar from Waseda University in Japan, who is spending part of her sabbatical (March-April) at Western

Welcome to Juan Chen, a visiting scholar from South China Normal University (and former postdoc with Mel Goodale and Jody Culham) who is spending her 2025 sabbatical at Queen’s University in Canada and visiting Western periodically during that time.

Welcome to Linda Rosbach, a visiting Master’s student from Regensburg University in Germany supervised by Angelika Lingnau. Linda will be working on a collaborative fMRI project comparing virtual to real hand actions.

Several new papers out

/

Congratulations to Lina Klein [co-supervised CREATE-IRTG PhD student] and Guido Maiello on the publication of a new article:

Klein, L.K., Maiello, G., Stubbs, K. M., Proklova, D., Chen, J., Paulun, V. C., Culham, J. C., & Fleming, R. W. (2023). Distinct neural components of visually guided grasping during planning and execution. Journal of Neuroscience, 43(49), 8504-8514.

Congratulations to Prof. Juan Chen and former MSc student Joey Paciocco on publication of a new article:

Chen, J., Paciocco, J. U., Deng, Z., & Culham, J. C. (2023). Human neuroimaging reveals differences in activation and connectivity between real and pantomimed tool use. Journal of Neuroscience, 43(46), 7853-7867.

New funding received for Brain and Mind at Western

/

Brain and Mind at Western, led by Ingrid Johnsrude (PI), received grants for $9M from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and Ontario Research Fund for “Next-generation human cognitive neuroscience for real-world applications”. The lab is particularly excited about getting access to state-of equipment for Virtual and Augmented Reality Displays (VR/AR), high-density optical neuroimaging (HD-DOT), and wearable MEG (using optically pumped magnetometers).

In memory of Margaret Maltz

/

We were deeply saddened to learn about the passing of Margaret Maltz, originally Margarita "Rita" Maltseva, on May 29, 2023.

Margaret “RITA” Maltz (1991-2023)

Rita was a Master's student (2013-15) and PhD student (2015-2020) in Psychology in Professor Jody Culham’s Lab at Western University until she went on medical leave in 2020.  She joined Western after immigrating to Canada from Russia and completing a Bachelor's honours degree at Trent University under the supervision of Professor Liana Brown.  Upon joining Western, she was an active participant in a CREATE-IRTG international training program between Canada and Germany.  During her participation in the CREATE program, she collaborated with Professor Gudrun Schwarzer's lab at Justis-Liebig University in Giessen Germany. 

Rita's research in the Culham Lab investigated how the size and distance of objects are perceived in the real world and how perception is influenced by our prior experience with the particular sizes of objects.  In a bold departure from the way perception is typically studied in laboratories, she moved away from studying images to study real, tangible objects.  This research required considerable creativity and outside-the-box thinking, for which Rita was ideally suited.  Memories of her in the lab include shopping sprees for miniature and oversized objects at local toy stores, lab testing rooms filled with sports balls of different sizes configured into the well-known Ebbinghaus illusion, and many months of tenacious troubleshooting to figure out how to present real objects at different distances in an MRI scanner without inducing artifacts.  Through her creative problem solving and grit, Rita completed novel research projects demonstrating robust but underappreciated effects of size and distance on perception and brain activation.

Rita will be remembered fondly for her vibrant personality, unbridled zest for life, quirky one-of-a-kind perspectives, and warm generosity

New paper dissociating action goals from motor actions

/

Congratulations to former lab postdoc, Guy Rens, on a new paper in Journal of Neuroscience based on his ambitious temporal coding analyses of data from Teresa Figley.

Rens, G., Figley, T. D., Gallivan, J. G., Liu, Y, & Culham, J. C. (2023). Grasping with a twist: Dissociating action goals from motor actions in human frontoparietal circuits. Journal of Neuroscience,43(32), 5831-5847.

New paper on familiar size perception in VR and the real world

/

We have a new publication from the lab:

Rzepka, A. M., Hussey, K. J., Maltz, M. V., Babin, K., Wilcox, L. M., & Culham, J. C. (2022). Familiar size affects perception differently in virtual reality and the real world. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 378, 20210464.

The article was featured by Western News: “Should you believe your eyes? Not necessarily in VR says new study”.