For additional updates, please check us out on Bluesky: @culhamari-lab.bsky.social
“Exploring neural responses in the human brain to real-world face size and distance”. Eva will be continuing in the lab as a Research Assistant and Lab Manager.
Read MoreEva Deligiannis got her first paper for elegant fMRI work investigating the contribution of binocular disparity to face processing.
Read MoreCongratulations to Sofia Varon, who will be heading to grad school at McGill University.
Thanks to visiting scholar Linda Rosbach from University of Regensburg for developing a technically challenging fMRI study.
Read MoreA new paper is out from a collaboration with Flo Martinez-Addiego, Yuqi Liu, and Ella Striem-Amit.
Read MoreWelcome to Emiko Muraki, who just began her postdoc on mental imagery and actions.
Welcome to Sanjivan Loganathan, a new MSc student in Psychology who just joined the lab after completing a BSc at University of Toronto.
Read MoreJody 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.
The lab congratulates postdoc Mozhgan Salimparsa on her new position as a data scientist at AmeriTrust Financial.
Read MoreFormer honours student and current research assistant Sofia Varon got her first publication: Target interception in virtual reality is better for natural than for unnatural trajectories
Read MoreOlivia Ipwanshek and Ben Pilling are joining the lab as MSc students in Psychology.
Shaylyn Kress, who received her PhD from the University of Saskatchewan will be starting a postdoc position at the University of Lethbridge, co-supervised on-site by Chelsea Ekstrand and remotely by Jody Culham.
Two new papers:
Dima, D. C., Janarthanan, S., Culham, J. C., & Mohsenzadeh, Y. (2024). Shared representations of human actions across vision and language. Neuropsychologia, 108962.
Deng, Z., Gao, J., Li, A., Chen, Y., Gao, B., Culham, J. C., & Chen, J. (2024). Viewpoint adaptation revealed potential representational differences between 2D images and 3D objects. Cognition, 105903.
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.
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).
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
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.
Jody (along with her dog, Doris) arrived in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where she’ll be spending a sabbatical writing manuscripts and an fMRI textbook.
Jody’s Dog, Doris, gets a new hairstyle (FURSTyle?) courtesy of the winds in newfoundland
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”.
Emily Davidson is presenting a poster at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego: Human neuroimaging reveals that agency in a video game boosts functional connectivity within and between brain networks
Jaana Leppala: Virtual hand actions show behavioural and neural signatures of right handedness
Emily Davidson: Human neuroimaging reveals that agency in a video game boosts functional connectivity within and between networks
Cassandra Bacher: The Effect of Active Learning on Viewpoint Dependence for Novel Objects
