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 broadly interested in voluntary memory control. His work in the lab includes behavioral and neurophysiological methods used to explore how individuals leverage their selective attention to retain a myriad of memories that are distinct, yet considerably interrelated. When he’s not doing science, he enjoys going to the gym, watching sports, and reading data-driven journalism.
BA. (Psychology) University of San Francisco, 2016
Ben Park
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.
BSc. (Psychology) University of Toronto, 2019
Research Assistants
Project Leaders
Amanda Leonetti
Amanda is a lab manager who is broadly interested in learning and unlearning. Amanda studies these concepts in the context of a response inhibition task by uncovering how we adjust our behaviour on a trial by trial basis. She is also interested in how we learn and unlearn relationships, particularly between valuable items and our attention, and what happens in the brain during these processes. When Amanda is not in the lab, she teaches competitive dance to children between the ages of 3-18.
BSc. (Biology for Health Science & Psychology) University of Toronto, 2020
Matthew Kolisnyk
Matthew is one of our lab managers who plans to continue working in the lab this summer on a project where he implements technology and algorithms for real-time prediction of participant behaviour using brain waves. He also hopes to utilize a variety of computational techniques to help individuals understand, predict, and explain fundamental questions of cognition.
BSc. (Psychology & Minor in Statistics), University of Toronto, April 2020
Rosa Torres
Rosa is quite interested in making memory and attention more efficient; e.g., how do we forget information we deem unimportant or negative which uses up our precious brain space? Her goal is to figure out how to manipulate long-term memory to benefit us the most while incorporating visual working memory and attention into the equation. Rosa is working on the projects ‘Retrieval Induced Forgetting’ and ‘Hybrid Search (target-distractor)’.
BSc. (Biology for Health Science & Psychology) University of Toronto, 2019
Sophia Winter
Sophia is interested in how people perceive each other. She is curious about the cognitive mechanisms that we use to interpret other peoples’ actions and how those actions, in turn, affect our perceptions of and behaviours towards others. She is leading the project ‘Stimulus-Response-Feedback (SRFB)’, and is helping with our ‘Face Wheel’ stimuli validation project.
Assistants to Project Leaders
Kaan Kanca
Kaan is a second year psychology student helping Ben and Rosa with the ‘Visual Working Memory Reset’ and ‘PACMAN’ EEG experiments.
Yvanna Yeo
Yvanna is helping Amanda with the ‘Countermanding’ project and the EEG BACON project. She wants to continue to gain experience in the lab and learn more about cognitive control.
BSc. (Psychology & Biology for Health Sciences), 2020
Faiz Ahmed
Faiz will be helping Rosa with her ‘Hybrid Search’ project. He is interested in identifying encoding pathways of short- and long-term memory as well as using machine learning to predict successful encoding.
Alumni
- Fatima Wasif (2016-2020) – PhD (Clinical Psychology) University of Waterloo
- April Pereira (2016-2019) – MA (Cognitive Psychology) University of Waterloo
- Sabina Iqbal (2016-2019) – BSN (Nursing) University of New Brunswick
- Shawall Pall (2016-2019) – PhD (Clinical Psychology) Fairleigh Dickinson University
- Asma Fadhl (2016-2017) BASc (Occupational Health and Safety) Ryerson University
- Hirotaka Sone (2016-2019) (Psychology) Toyama University
- Erica Chen (2017) – MSc (Health: Science, Technology & Policy) Carleton University
- Anjali Pandey (2017) – MSc (Experimental Psychology) Dalhousie University
- Jeanny Kim
- Kyana Fletcher
- Saphia Shariff
- Richard Lee
- Aimen Azfar
