Welcome! We are a humble team of passionate researchers; we’re passionate about vision science, the brain, and a good team barbeque in the park. Learn more below about who we are now and who we used to be – through the individuals who give their sweat and blood to help build our lab.
Principal Investigator
Keisuke Fukuda
Kei’s research focuses on our ability to select goal-related information from a plethora of irrelevant information (selective attention), represent and manipulate the selected information (working memory), and store and retrieve the information later in time (long-term memory). He approaches his research questions utilizing electrophysiological recordings (e.g., scalp EEG, ERP, single-unit recordings, and local-field potentials) and an individual differences approach. He is also interested in assisting and improving human cognition by translating the findings and techniques in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. UTM Faculty Page
BSc. (Psychology, minor in Mathematics) University of Oregon
MS. (Psychology) University of Oregon
PhD. (Psychology) University of Oregon
Graduate Students
Caitlin Tozios
Caitlin is undertaking her PhD in the Fukuda Lab. She is interested in the vulnerability of memory during encoding and retrieval – through examining the robustness of the encoding specificity principle (i.e., context-dependent memory), to understanding our inflated perceived confidence in visual working memory judgements (i.e., metacognitive accuracy). Caitlin herself is vulnerable to being sloth, which is why she enjoys naps with her cat and eating out at new places in the 6ix when not in the lab.
MSc. (Cognitive Neuroscience) Wilfrid Laurier University, 2017
BSc. (Psychology & Neuroscience) University of Toronto, 2014
Joseph Saito
Joe is a PhD student who is interested in memory control processes. His work in the lab includes behavioral and neurophysiological methods used to explore how individuals retain a myriad of memories that are distinct, yet considerably interrelated and overlapping. When he’s not doing science, he enjoys going to the gym, watching sports, and reading data-driven journalism.
M.A. (Psychology) University of Toronto, 2020
B.A. (Psychology) University of San Francisco, 2016
Greer Gillies
Greer is an MA student co-supervised by Jonathan Cant from UTSC and is interested in perception and visual working memory. Her current projects involve ensemble coding and stimulus memorability. When not sobbing over an excel spreadsheet, Greer is either painting or asleep.
BSc. (Psychology) University of Guelph, 2018
Ben Park
*Ben is currently on leave as of January 2021, although he is still available by email (below)
Ben is currently pursuing his master’s under the joint supervision of professors Keisuke Fukuda & Dirk Bernhardt-Walther. His overarching aim is to explore new ways to measure, model, and predict visually guided behaviour from the framework of human visual working memory (VWM). Currently, he uses electroencephalography (EEG) measures to examine (1) how dynamic visual information is represented in VWM, and (2) how task-related visual information is communicated between hemispheres of the brain.
MA (Psychology) University of Toronto, 2020
BSc. (Psychology) University of Toronto, 2019
Lab Manager
Matthew Kolisnyk
Matthew is the lab manager at the Fukuda lab. He is interested in using computational and electrophysiological approaches to predict various aspects of cognition. At present, he is investigating the relationship between VWM encoding and conscious experience. In his spare time, he plays video games and annoys his cats.
BSc. (Psychology & Minor in Statistics) University of Toronto
email Matthew (personal)
Research Assistants
Project Leaders
Jerrick Teoh
Jerrick is interested in how we can systematically manipulate our memories of past events. In particular, he is interested in the mechanism that drives memory biasing and the potential applications it has in remedying mental disorders. His current experiment investigates how our memory of faces can be distorted when we encounter a new face that looks similar to the original face.
Project: Similarity-Induced Memory Bias with Human Faces
BSc. (Psychology (Specialist) & Sociology) University of Toronto Mississauga
Research Assistants
Sidra Anjum
Sidra is interested in understanding how the perceptual similarity of faces match the physical similarity of faces, along with race and gender effects. Additionally, she is super interested in understanding how the brain influences the way that humans think, feel and behave.
Assisting project(s): Face Similarity Task
BASc. (Human Behaviour: Psychology, Neuroscience, & Behaviour) McMaster University
Mercedes Eileen Villanueva
Mercedes is in interested in studying the neural mechanisms of speech, language, and memory. She hopes to gain a better understanding of these mechanisms and to combine this with her clinical experience to develop future interventions for populations with significant speech, language, and/or memory deficits (e.g. post-stroke patients, Alzheimer’s patients, children with Level 2 Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnoses, etc.).
Assisting project(s): Experiential Blink (EB)
BSc. (Neuroscience & Immunology) University of Toronto
Post-graduate diploma (Communicative Disorders Assistant Program) Georgian College, 2020
BA (Linguistics & History of Art ) University of Toronto, 2019
Zoryana Babiy
Zoryana is interested in the implications of this lab’s memory distortion research (i.e., similarity-induced memory bias) on clinical populations. More specifically, she is intrigued by the impact of psychiatric and neurodegenerative disease on the short-term and long-term memory processes at the molecular and behavioural levels.
Assisting project(s): Similarity-Induced Memory Bias
BSc. (Biology & Psychology, minor in Chemistry) University of Toronto, 2020
Sala Ghazal
Sala is interested in learning about how the different types of memories work, particularly working memory, and how information gets encoded into our long-term memory.
Assisting project(s): Experiential Blink (EB)
BSc. (Biology for Health Sciences & Psychology) University of Toronto
Jason Woo
Jason is interested in the intersection between memory and everyday life. Specifically, he is interested in long-term memory and how different factors influence memory performance. At a broader scope, he hopes to extend related knowledge to clinical settings, and explore the interactions between memory and psychological abnormality.
Assisting project(s): Memorability
BSc. (Psychology & Environmental Management, minor in Biology) University of Toronto
Yvanna Yeo
Yvanna is interested in associative memory errors and the malleability of our memory. In particular, she is interested in how memories can be systematically distorted in order to treat maladaptive symptoms of mental disorders such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and affective disorders.
Assisting project(s): RIMB Face, RIMB Test Effect
BSc. (Biology for Health Sciences, Psychology) University of Toronto, 2020
Jaskiran Garcha
Jaskiran enjoys learning about the association between specific brain regions and their corresponding functions. The interaction between different neuronal circuits that underlie behavioural tasks and how they are learnt and remembered intrigues her. From a larger perspective, eventually, she would like to explore the impact of neurodegenerative diseases on these molecular processes.
Assisting project(s): Memorability
BSc. University of Toronto
Sarah Khan
Sarah is interested in understanding the cognitive and neural networks that underlie human behaviour, particularly with regard to clinical populations. More specifically, she is interested in working with this lab to learn how these networks interact during facial processing, and how memory and perception of human faces may be biased when similar faces are presented.
Assisting project(s): Similarity-Induced Memory Bias with Human Faces
BSc. (Psychology, minor in Biology & Sociology) University of Toronto, 2019
Amit Dalaya
Amit is a fourth year undergraduate student at UofT, majoring in psychology and minoring in biology and environmental management. He’s currently assisting Caitlin with her work on the metacognitive accuracy of visual short-term memory. His research interests lie in memory performance biases and the meta-judgment of memories following consolidation.
Assisting project(s): Metacognition
BSc. (Psychology, minor in Biology & Environmental Management) University of Toronto
Alumni
- Amanda Leonetti – MSc (Biology) University of Toronto
- Rosa Torres – MA (Psychology) Brock University
- Fatima Wasif – PhD (Clinical Psychology) University of Waterloo
- April Pereira – MA (Cognitive Psychology) University of Waterloo
- Sabina Iqbal – BSN (Nursing) University of New Brunswick
- Shawall Pall – PhD (Clinical Psychology) Fairleigh Dickinson University
- Asma Fadhl – BASc (Occupational Health & Safety) Ryerson University
- Hirotaka Sone – MA (Psychology) Toyama University
- Erica Chen – MSc (Health: Science, Technology & Policy) Carleton University
- Anjali Pandey – MSc (Experimental Psychology) Dalhousie University
