A big congratulations to Alyssa Smith, one of the graduate student trainees in my lab, for being awarded with Best Oral Presentation at CSBBCS’s Annual Meeting this past week! This is the second year in a row that one of our graduate trainees has won a student award at CSBBCS and it speaks highly to the calibre of interesting research that our students are leading and the incredible presentation skills and story-telling abilities they possess! I feel like such a proud parent!
I always love attending CSBBCS every year and seeing what my fellow Canadians are up to across the provinces. This year was also extra special since I was awarded Runner-Up for Best Oral Presentation for my talk showing that fluctuation patterns between attentional and mind wandering states are associated with differential life outcomes. This was the same talk that I won an award for at HBHL earlier this year and clearly there’s something about this line of research that resonates with people!
I had a great time at the Healthy Brain for Healthy Lives Research Day learning about the amazing work we’re doing on delivering implementable and clinically effective outcomes for brain health. I’m also honoured that my talk Within-individual oscillatory patterns in mind wandering and attentive states are associated with functional life outcomes was selected as the Best Oral Presentation of the day!
Touched to have received the Michael Quek Teaching Assistantship award for my work in Cognitive Development over the Fall. I’ve definitely missed teaching classes over my PhD given the external awards I’ve held over the past few years, and it’s good to know my general moxie and nerdiness still lands!
I’ve been working on an exciting new communication platform for the Vision & Attention Laboratory using NodeJS, Embedded Javascript, and WebRTC APIs these past few months. The data collection on these projects is going to be massive, involving behavioural, video, audio, and eye tracking metrics, and just wanted to give everyone a little sneak peek before we go live later in the Fall term!
Just finished a great three-day workshop from CenterStat as an Introduction to Structural Equation Modeling. Cannot recommend this course highly enough as Drs. Dan Bauer and Patrick Curran did a phenomenal job keeping everyone engaged and interested through the theoretical processing and linear algebra content, and I’m definitely excited for the rest of their statistical training line-up this summer!
I was privileged and excited to receive an entrance scholarship from Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives to the IVADO / MILA Deep Learning Summer School, which took place this past week at UQAM. The week-long school provided a deep dive into machine learning and deep learning techniques and had us thinking about the best ways to use these methods within our own big datasets. All of the talks were aimed at a broad audience, with theoretical lectures first thing in the morning, mathematical ones at midday, and computational tutorials later in the afternoon, which really helped in understanding the methods across different perspectives.
I particularly appreciated Jeremy Pinto’s lectures on CNNs since it has such overlap with my current work on predicting changes in attentional and mind wandering states. Khimya Khetarpal also had a great talk on RL that touched upon some of my interest in predicting eye movements within real-world environments, and it was quite a callback to when I learned about Markov models back in 2008 during my time at Queen’s! I’d also be remiss to not mention Golnoosh Farnadi’s talk on how to account for bias and discrimination in AI, which was a great bookend to finish up our Friday afternoon and to think about the idea that sometimes the most efficient way that machines ‘learn’ is by exploiting inefficiencies and loopholes that already exist in the system.
Beyond being incredibly informative and well-organized (a huge thanks to Nathalie Sanon and Nadia Bennaïli on keeping things running smoothly all week), I was personally grateful that IVADO and MILA were committed to reducing plastic consumption during the week-long school, since these events can usually leave a huge footprint in terms of waste – all of our lunch and break materials were 100% biodegradable, reusable, and compostable, and they had a system set up so we could recycle our name tags and any other materials we were given once the summer school was done. Really loved seeing these institutes care about their impact beyond the learning material!
I’d highly recommend this summer school for those interested in getting started with ML and DL techniques (Vancouver-ites, they’ll be running this school at UBC soon!), and I can’t wait to start training some neural nets myself! Stay tuned to my Software page for some implementable examples and cool visuals to follow!
Excited to see the work from my industry internship at SR Research integrated into the latest version of the Experiment Builder software! You can now directly co-register BioSemi EEG hardware with the EyeLink systems via their built-in TTL nodes and I can’t wait to start using this feature in my own work!
Being part of McGill University’s new NSERC CD-CREATE grant has afforded me the incredible opportunity to attend a workshop on Nonlinear Dynamic Analyses, taught by University of Cincinnati’s Drs. Michael Richardson and Paula Silva. I could not recommend this workshop highly enough! Between recurrence quantification analyses and cross and joint domains, this analytical toolset has really broadened my statistical perspective and made me think outside-the-box on how I can examine temporal effects across all my dependent measures, from accuracy to RT to eye tracking to EEG. Can’t wait to get started on my own data analysis here!
My new EEG Analyses program (EEGAN) is fully functional and available under the Software page. I’m still working through a few minor warning bugs with non-cell referencing but the code is officially good to go!
Quite proud of the History of Psychology timeline our cognitive cohort put together in our Psychological Methods class this month. Working with JSON for the first time with the TimelineJS API was quite informative and I loved the flexibility we had when building this interactive retrospective!
I had a phenomenal time with CSPC Science Meets Parliament program last week, where brilliant researchers across Canada met with MPs & Senators on the Hill, bringing together the people generating knowledge in Canada with those who use it for the public good.
It was my first year being on the SMP Organizing Committee this time around and I loved talking about my past experience in the program and getting to work behind the scenes to help researchers understand the pivotal part we play in Canada’s policy-making landscape. SMP was easily the highlight of 2023 for me, and the fact that I can say that again this year is in no small part to the stellar team I get to work with who make this job immensely fun – shout outs to this amazing crew and can’t wait to grow the program with you all in the future!
I had a whirlwind of a week in Ottawa this past week, representing the University of Waterloo and Queen’s University, and meeting with MPs as part of the CSPC Science Meets Parliament program. The program brought together Tier 2 CRCs, Independent Indigenous Researchers, & Banting Postdoctoral Fellows to strengthen the connection between science & policy communities and learn about how scientific evidence is used for policy making in Parliament.
It was amazing to see the love for research and innovation at some of the highest levels of government, and I was thrilled to meet with Dr. Mona Nemer, Chief Science Advisor of Canada, Valerie Bradford, MP for Kitchener South-Hespeler, and numerous others. I cannot think of better people to champion the great scientific work we do here in Canada!
A hearty thanks to everyone involved in organizing this phenomenal event and helping us build lasting connections with other diverse researchers and with parliamentarians and their staff. I’m excited to put my new scicomm and policy skills to work!
Thrilled that I had a chance to chat with the Faculty of Arts about my Banting award for my research program on the temporal dynamics of internal attention. A big thanks to the University of Waterloo for their support and feedback throughout the process, and major shoutouts to my alma maters McGill University and Queen’s University for pushing my curiosity in new directions!
Excited to announce that I’ve joined the Editorial Board of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology as a Board Member starting as of the new year! CJEP is one of CPA’s flagship publications for original work in the field of experimental psychology, and I’m so thrilled to be joining the Incoming Editor Dr. Debra Titone and the stellar team of Associate Editors in Drs. Myra Fernandes, Marc Joanisse, and Ben Dyson!
Since the start of the year, I’ve been involved with Simply Neuroscience, an international non-profit outreach society that empowers young students to get involved in the cognitive sciences through education, outreach, and awareness. As a Senior Academic Mentor with the Action Potential Advising Program, I’ve just been paired with 1 high school and 1 undergraduate student to introduce them to academia and research, and provide them with educational advice as they navigate their early career in the sciences.
Remembering how overwhelming academia can feel at the start of my career, it’s great that I now have the opportunity to give back and be a mentor to others in the field!
Had such a wonderful time at my very last lab meeting with the Attention & Social Cognition Laboratory this month and it’s hard to believe it’s been 6 years already! Will miss this wonderful group of humans so much!
Had an incredible time at BrainCamp with the Kavli Summer Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Santa Barbara, California these past two weeks. Between meeting new colleagues from all around the world, talking to world-renowned scholars, dissecting a human brain, and learning new methodologies to expand my own work in attention, this experience was completely beyond what any academic and researcher could ever hope. Grateful for my time there and excited to put my new skills to use!
A big congratulations to Alyssa Smith, one of the graduate student trainees in my lab, for being awarded with Best Oral Presentation at CSBBCS’s Annual Meeting this past week! This is the second year in a row that one of our graduate trainees has won a student award at CSBBCS and it speaks highly to the calibre of interesting research that our students are leading and the incredible presentation skills and story-telling abilities they possess! I feel like such a proud parent!
Had a great time presenting virtually at CSBBCS this year, and debuting some of the new recurrence methods I’ve been able to apply to my mind wandering data. Though I definitely miss the in-person component of these conferences, I loved the platform the CSBBCS execs decided to use this year, and the graduate committee also put together some wonderful social get-togethers on GatherTown. Phenomenal job all around!
Goodness, it was quite the surprise opening up my email and seeing my picture promoting the Virtual Healthy Brain for Healthy Lives Research Day this year! I had a great time giving my talk at last year’s Research Day and can’t wait to see their line-up again this year!
It’s always a great time attending OPAM and Psychonomics every November, and I loved presenting my latest fMRI work looking at the relationship between the default network of our brain and the content of what we mind wander to. fMRI is certainly a whole new beast in terms of pre-processing and data analyses, though I was excited to wade through it all with my expert colleague and former thesis student, Lauri Gurguryan. We’re hoping to delve into some graph theory for the second stage of our analyses and I’ll ideally have more conference updates from this project in the new year!
I always love attending CSBBCS every year and seeing what my fellow Canadians are up to across the provinces. This year was also extra special since I was awarded Runner-Up for Best Oral Presentation for my talk showing that fluctuation patterns between attentional and mind wandering states are associated with differential life outcomes. This was the same talk that I won an award for at HBHL earlier this year and clearly there’s something about this line of research that resonates with people!
I had a great time at the Healthy Brain for Healthy Lives Research Day learning about the amazing work we’re doing on delivering implementable and clinically effective outcomes for brain health. I’m also honoured that my talk Within-individual oscillatory patterns in mind wandering and attentive states are associated with functional life outcomes was selected as the Best Oral Presentation of the day!
Had a great time presenting my work on attentional selection of faces at VSS in St. Pete Beach this past month. The more that I work the conference circuit and talk about our non-replication of the social attentional bias, the more I realize that others have had similar issues in mimicking this supposedly robust effect. It’s great to have validation of our methods, but it’s equally as astounding to think of the number of file-drawer studies that were prematurely retired because the original effects were thought to be robust across all conditions and tasks. Will be excited to hear the feedback we get on the paper once it’s published!
It was wonderful to spend time at the OPAM and Psychonomics conference in Vancouver, B.C. this month. Had some great conversations about my new method of analyzing temporal fluctuations in mind wandering, and the exciting research definitely made up for the non-stop rainy days there!
One benefit of teaching yourself and re-learning analytical techniques is coming up with fun ways to apply these methods to new data so that you can play around with parameters. Which essentially means that I stayed up until 4am applying recurrence quantification analyses to A Song of Ice & Fire!
Recurrence plots are a great way to depict repetitions within any kind of time series data, and if we create recurrent plots for all of the viewpoints we hear from in all five books, and then separate these based off of the Characters versus the Houses they represent, there’s such a fun difference in patterns here.
Within the recurrence plots POVs grouped by Characters, we can see a very clear white band that only occurs in Book 4 and Book 4 alone, showing a lack of repetitions in this book from the characters we met in Books 1-3, and supporting this idea that George R. R. Martin introduced A LOT of new characters in Book 4. But interestingly, when you look at recurrence plot POVs grouped by Houses, these bands disappear, and instead you get almost a shift throughout the plot, with darker regions in Books 1-3 compared to lighter regions in Books 4 and 5. What this suggests is that these viewpoints may not have been the detour we quite felt when reading the books, and instead there’s just been a general trend towards hearing from lesser known characters from houses we already know and love (or loathe).
If Martin ever comes out with Books 6 and 7, it’d be great to see if we revisit these Character POVs or see a change in which Houses we hear from over time, likely on account of some families becoming less important (or on account of their untimely deaths). But in the meantime, it’s been fun to work with RQA methods again and revisit some of my favourites from these books!
Though most have been busy with sourdough starters this week, I had tons of fun solving The Miracle Sudoku from Cracking the Cryptic crew! Simon Anthony’s turn at it was way more spellbinding than my own, but I’d highly recommend giving it a go if you’d like to spend an afternoon playing with numbers!
It certainly has been a difficult time around the world these past few weeks, and I’m reminded of this great quote from Dr. Margaret Mead on what makes a civilization. We are at our best when we serve others, and that’s no more true than at times like this. Stay safe everyone!
Loved this article from the New Scientist on how we lost the world-changing power of useless knowledge. It harkens back to one of my favourite quotes from Dr. Nancy Kanwisher:
‘Many people justify the high cost of neuroscience research by pointing out that it may help us someday to treat brain disorders like Alzheimer’s and autism. That’s a hugely important goal, and I’d be thrilled if any of my work contributed to it, but fixing things that are broken in the world is not the only thing that’s worth doing.’
Great long piece on the lovely relationship and pioneering work of Drs. Kahneman and Tversky, and extra kudos for the additional tie-in into what we know about baseball’s competitive advantage strategies.
I had a whirlwind of a week in Ottawa this past week, representing the University of Waterloo and Queen’s University, and meeting with MPs as part of the CSPC Science Meets Parliament program. The program brought together Tier 2 CRCs, Independent Indigenous Researchers, & Banting Postdoctoral Fellows to strengthen the connection between science & policy communities and learn about how scientific evidence is used for policy making in Parliament.
It was amazing to see the love for research and innovation at some of the highest levels of government, and I was thrilled to meet with Dr. Mona Nemer, Chief Science Advisor of Canada, Valerie Bradford, MP for Kitchener South-Hespeler, and numerous others. I cannot think of better people to champion the great scientific work we do here in Canada!
A hearty thanks to everyone involved in organizing this phenomenal event and helping us build lasting connections with other diverse researchers and with parliamentarians and their staff. I’m excited to put my new scicomm and policy skills to work!
Beyond thrilled to announce that I was awarded the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2022-2024! Although I was officially told about the results back in February, the announcement of the award has been under wraps until all the paperwork could be settled and I finally get to scream it out into the void now!
It’s hard to put into words what an award like this means to me – as an academic, the validation of my work is incredible; as a first-generation scholar, the access to resources is immense; and as someone who had never really seen herself represented anywhere in science, the ability to be in such a significant position for my students and others in the field makes me a bit speechless. Although I put a lot of hard work and time and effort into the application, I’m also incredibly thankful to all of my many mentors and advisors who supported me in getting here. I owe you all many bagels and cupcakes!
So excited to be one of nine applicants selected from the University of Waterloo to be passed forward for a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship! The entire process has involved a lot of moving parts, and I’m very grateful for all of the feedback from colleagues who have helped me get this far!
I was privileged and excited to receive an entrance scholarship from Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives to the IVADO / MILA Deep Learning Summer School, which took place this past week at UQAM. The week-long school provided a deep dive into machine learning and deep learning techniques and had us thinking about the best ways to use these methods within our own big datasets. All of the talks were aimed at a broad audience, with theoretical lectures first thing in the morning, mathematical ones at midday, and computational tutorials later in the afternoon, which really helped in understanding the methods across different perspectives.
I particularly appreciated Jeremy Pinto’s lectures on CNNs since it has such overlap with my current work on predicting changes in attentional and mind wandering states. Khimya Khetarpal also had a great talk on RL that touched upon some of my interest in predicting eye movements within real-world environments, and it was quite a callback to when I learned about Markov models back in 2008 during my time at Queen’s! I’d also be remiss to not mention Golnoosh Farnadi’s talk on how to account for bias and discrimination in AI, which was a great bookend to finish up our Friday afternoon and to think about the idea that sometimes the most efficient way that machines ‘learn’ is by exploiting inefficiencies and loopholes that already exist in the system.
Beyond being incredibly informative and well-organized (a huge thanks to Nathalie Sanon and Nadia Bennaïli on keeping things running smoothly all week), I was personally grateful that IVADO and MILA were committed to reducing plastic consumption during the week-long school, since these events can usually leave a huge footprint in terms of waste – all of our lunch and break materials were 100% biodegradable, reusable, and compostable, and they had a system set up so we could recycle our name tags and any other materials we were given once the summer school was done. Really loved seeing these institutes care about their impact beyond the learning material!
I’d highly recommend this summer school for those interested in getting started with ML and DL techniques (Vancouver-ites, they’ll be running this school at UBC soon!), and I can’t wait to start training some neural nets myself! Stay tuned to my Software page for some implementable examples and cool visuals to follow!
Over this past summer, I was hired by SR Research as part of my NSERC CD-CREATE funding for a four-month industry internship, running from May to August. My primary project involved integrating SR Research’s eye trackers with various EEG equipment in order to evaluate visual experiences and neural patterns together in naturalistic task settings. Over the past few months, I traveled back and forth to their site in Ottawa for training, and worked with various labs in Montreal and Kingston to detail a workflow that could be used as an industry standard for the optimal integration of eye tracking data and EEG brain activity.
It’s been amazing working with the company and I gained such a great deal of knowledge about their hardware since I was physically building and co-registering computers and equipment together. Their support staff and engineers are also the best in the business and I can’t sing their praises enough!
At the end of my internship, I wrote up a technical manual that details how to interface the eyetracker with various EEG systems and coded a few programs on MATLAB and Experiment Builder that could be used as example cases to test the system. SR Research is planning on eventually using this as part of their industry standard document on co-registration and I can’t wait to see the final project come together after months of hard work!
Being part of McGill University’s new NSERC CD-CREATE grant has afforded me the incredible opportunity to attend a workshop on Nonlinear Dynamic Analyses, taught by University of Cincinnati’s Drs. Michael Richardson and Paula Silva. I could not recommend this workshop highly enough! Between recurrence quantification analyses and cross and joint domains, this analytical toolset has really broadened my statistical perspective and made me think outside-the-box on how I can examine temporal effects across all my dependent measures, from accuracy to RT to eye tracking to EEG. Can’t wait to get started on my own data analysis here!
Had an incredible time at BrainCamp with the Kavli Summer Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Santa Barbara, California these past two weeks. Between meeting new colleagues from all around the world, talking to world-renowned scholars, dissecting a human brain, and learning new methodologies to expand my own work in attention, this experience was completely beyond what any academic and researcher could ever hope. Grateful for my time there and excited to put my new skills to use!
So thrilled to show off our official name and logo for the Queen’s Attentional Dynamics Laboratory or the QuAD Lab for short. A big thank you to graphic designer Eric Brousseau for the mock up and can’t wait to get the space up and running once construction is complete!
I’m also so excited with how well my office space has come together too. Between the purple walls and all the orphan plants I’ve been taking in, it’s definitely become my cozy work spot this year. A big shout out to local Kingston artist Little Daydreamer for some great pixel art to help keep my head in the clouds!
Excited to see McGill University’s Bicentennial website up and running, along with my graphic design work for the Faculty of Science timeline. It was a lot of fun rooting through the photo archives and finding out more about the history of science at my alma mater and great to see everyone’s hard work at its end goal.
Had a great time working on the layout and graphics for McGill Psychology Department’s Virtual Poster Board, to recognize all of our undergraduate thesis students this year who were not able to present in-person for Undergraduate Research Day. Although physical distancing might have kept us all apart, I’m glad we have this living online document of the tremendous work they all put in.
Really excited that I got to flex my digital media skills and put together a Virtual Convocation video from our various faculty members to celebrate this milestone during these physically-distant times!
I’m always excited to launch the yearly issue of the McGill Psychology Department newsletter, but this year was extra fun because I got to flex my infographic muscle by showcasing how well the department has done in 2019! Can’t wait to do some fun timeline work for my final issue before graduating next year!
The 2nd issue of McGill Psychology Department’s newsletter is out! This was certainly a labour of love on my part, from trying to craft the design and theme to celebrating the incredible research we have in our department. Thanks to everyone who contributed their ideas and suggestions, and excited to hear your feedback!
Quite proud of the History of Psychology timeline our cognitive cohort put together in our Psychological Methods class this month. Working with JSON for the first time with the TimelineJS API was quite informative and I loved the flexibility we had when building this interactive retrospective!
So thrilled to show off our official name and logo for the Queen’s Attentional Dynamics Laboratory or the QuAD Lab for short. A big thank you to graphic designer Eric Brousseau for the mock up and can’t wait to get the space up and running once construction is complete!
I’m also so excited with how well my office space has come together too. Between the purple walls and all the orphan plants I’ve been taking in, it’s definitely become my cozy work spot this year. A big shout out to local Kingston artist Little Daydreamer for some great pixel art to help keep my head in the clouds!
So excited that we got to end 2021 with our new little one, Loki, who has been both the love of our lives and the bane of our existence since we adopted him two months ago. Yes, he really is that cute, and no, I cannot deny him a thing because of it!
More exciting research news for the start of the year since Chapter 4 of my dissertation is officially out in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance. This was the final chapter from my dissertation left to be published and I’m really proud of this beast of a study that incorporated 6 separate experiments covering behavioural, eye tracking, and bayesian analyses!
My findings are also really captivating because this work shows that spontaneous attentional biasing to faces is biased by the external content factor of perceived facial attractiveness, and not other content factors like global luminance or featural configuration, demonstrating that attractiveness in faces is rather critical in eliciting these effects. My findings also further highlight the utility of reconceptualizing attention as an integrative system that can be influenced and controlled by not just stimulus factors and task information, but also internal preferences and personal experiences.
Wonderful research news to start the year, with Chapter 3 of my dissertation being published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics! In this chapter, I further probed whether the external factor of frequency may be responsible in preferential and spontaneous attentional biasing towards faces and eyes. We found our prior trend of dissociations between overtly looking at faces with our eyes and covertly attending to them with our mind’s eye, but we also specifically found that face novelty promotes more spontaneous biasing towards the eyes of infrequently presented faces!
Excited to see McGill University’s Bicentennial website up and running, along with my graphic design work for the Faculty of Science timeline. It was a lot of fun rooting through the photo archives and finding out more about the history of science at my alma mater and great to see everyone’s hard work at its end goal.
A big thank you to Drs. Jérôme Sackur and Vincent de Gardelle for inviting me to the Subjective Correlates of Cognition group this week for a talk! I presented my work from McGill and UWaterloo that identifies unique patterns of fluctuations between attentional and mind wandering states, and the utility of recurrence techniques to uncover differential relationships within these patterns. It was great hearing their feedback and getting their expertise in these techniques, and I am forever thankful to online video communication platforms for allowing me to present in Paris from my apartment in downtown Montreal!
Had such a wonderful time at my very last lab meeting with the Attention & Social Cognition Laboratory this month and it’s hard to believe it’s been 6 years already! Will miss this wonderful group of humans so much!
Officially defended my PhD thesis today, and surprisingly, it was a really great and fun experience! A big thank you to my defense committee members for all of their thoughtful comments and questions and for sticking around late on a Friday afternoon! Though I’m sure I’ll feel quite reflective of my closing chapter at McGill over the next few days, I’m also incredibly stoked to get started with my post-PhD life at the University of Waterloo!
Had a great time working on the layout and graphics for McGill Psychology Department’s Virtual Poster Board, to recognize all of our undergraduate thesis students this year who were not able to present in-person for Undergraduate Research Day. Although physical distancing might have kept us all apart, I’m glad we have this living online document of the tremendous work they all put in.
Goodness, it was quite the surprise opening up my email and seeing my picture promoting the Virtual Healthy Brain for Healthy Lives Research Day this year! I had a great time giving my talk at last year’s Research Day and can’t wait to see their line-up again this year!
Really excited that I got to flex my digital media skills and put together a Virtual Convocation video from our various faculty members to celebrate this milestone during these physically-distant times!
As part of a reflection on the Black Lives Matter movement and our collective and ongoing fight against institutionalized and structural Anti-Black racism, the McGill Psychology Department allowed me to use the June edition of our Spotlight Series to interview researchers in the department who specialize in how individuals perceive and evaluate one another across group boundaries. It was great to talk to faculty member Dr. Eric Hehman and Vanier Scholar Eugene Ofosu about the impact of communicating norms at individual, group, and institutional levels, and to contribute to the conversation on how to be an ally for historically excluded groups.
Great to have the first of my mind wandering papers out with my wonderful colleague Lauri Gurguryan. This work started 5 years ago as part of her undergraduate thesis project when she was working in our lab, and although it was stuck in triage for quite a while, we’re glad to finally see this in press.
One of the projects Lauri and I worked on was why we see such disparate outcomes of mind wandering behaviours, such that some individuals might have negative consequences when their mind wanders, whereas others have benefits. We thought that these differences might be due to internal characteristics, such that some people might have better control over how and when their mind wanders, which then allows them to use mind wandering for strategic purposes. Our paper in Frontiers found exactly this – individuals who have a lower ability to regulate and control their attention experience more negative outcomes across work / academic performance when they mind wander, and those who have higher ability experience more positive outcomes.
Although this paper was years in the making, we’re really proud to have this piece out as a prelude to our forthcoming papers characterizing temporal dynamics in mind wandering to predict real world outcomes.
The learning curve when transitioning my mind wandering lecture to an online format was certainly quite steep and I’m not embarrassed to admit that it took me the better part of a day to figure out how to record and upload a 2hr lecture for the summer session of Cognition without constantly starting and stopping or talking with my hands! Suffice to say, I have a much greater appreciation for professors and lecturers who do this every day. Hats off to you all!
This project took a bit of a backseat given my dissertation writing these past few months, but I’m thrilled to relaunch the Spotlight Series feature for the McGill Psychology Department this month! In this monthly feature, I interview graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in our department and craft profiles on them and the work that they do. It’s been amazingly fun flexing my writing skills and crafting work for a more general audience, and I’m excited for everyone to read some of the features we have coming up over the next few months!
It’s always a great time attending OPAM and Psychonomics every November, and I loved presenting my latest fMRI work looking at the relationship between the default network of our brain and the content of what we mind wander to. fMRI is certainly a whole new beast in terms of pre-processing and data analyses, though I was excited to wade through it all with my expert colleague and former thesis student, Lauri Gurguryan. We’re hoping to delve into some graph theory for the second stage of our analyses and I’ll ideally have more conference updates from this project in the new year!
I’m always excited to launch the yearly issue of the McGill Psychology Department newsletter, but this year was extra fun because I got to flex my infographic muscle by showcasing how well the department has done in 2019! Can’t wait to do some fun timeline work for my final issue before graduating next year!
I was privileged and excited to receive an entrance scholarship from Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives to the IVADO / MILA Deep Learning Summer School, which took place this past week at UQAM. The week-long school provided a deep dive into machine learning and deep learning techniques and had us thinking about the best ways to use these methods within our own big datasets. All of the talks were aimed at a broad audience, with theoretical lectures first thing in the morning, mathematical ones at midday, and computational tutorials later in the afternoon, which really helped in understanding the methods across different perspectives.
I particularly appreciated Jeremy Pinto’s lectures on CNNs since it has such overlap with my current work on predicting changes in attentional and mind wandering states. Khimya Khetarpal also had a great talk on RL that touched upon some of my interest in predicting eye movements within real-world environments, and it was quite a callback to when I learned about Markov models back in 2008 during my time at Queen’s! I’d also be remiss to not mention Golnoosh Farnadi’s talk on how to account for bias and discrimination in AI, which was a great bookend to finish up our Friday afternoon and to think about the idea that sometimes the most efficient way that machines ‘learn’ is by exploiting inefficiencies and loopholes that already exist in the system.
Beyond being incredibly informative and well-organized (a huge thanks to Nathalie Sanon and Nadia Bennaïli on keeping things running smoothly all week), I was personally grateful that IVADO and MILA were committed to reducing plastic consumption during the week-long school, since these events can usually leave a huge footprint in terms of waste – all of our lunch and break materials were 100% biodegradable, reusable, and compostable, and they had a system set up so we could recycle our name tags and any other materials we were given once the summer school was done. Really loved seeing these institutes care about their impact beyond the learning material!
I’d highly recommend this summer school for those interested in getting started with ML and DL techniques (Vancouver-ites, they’ll be running this school at UBC soon!), and I can’t wait to start training some neural nets myself! Stay tuned to my Software page for some implementable examples and cool visuals to follow!
A big thank you to Trevor Nace and Emily Spear, editors at Science Trends, who featured my dissertation work as an article on their platform. It’s been great getting some press on this research showing that although spontaneous attention to faces may be less robust than we expected, it’s also much more complex than we realized!
Excited to see the work from my industry internship at SR Research integrated into the latest version of the Experiment Builder software! You can now directly co-register BioSemi EEG hardware with the EyeLink systems via their built-in TTL nodes and I can’t wait to start using this feature in my own work!
I always love attending CSBBCS every year and seeing what my fellow Canadians are up to across the provinces. This year was also extra special since I was awarded Runner-Up for Best Oral Presentation for my talk showing that fluctuation patterns between attentional and mind wandering states are associated with differential life outcomes. This was the same talk that I won an award for at HBHL earlier this year and clearly there’s something about this line of research that resonates with people!
Chapter 2 of my dissertation is currently out in the open access journal Vision! In this chapter, I further probed what factors may be responsible in preferential and spontaneous attentional biasing towards faces and eyes, and investigated visual context through background scene information. It seems like seeing faces in embedded environments does in fact enhance more overt measures of social attentional biasing (i.e., when eyes are free to move).
We also found interesting dissociations between directly looking at faces with our eyes and covertly attending to them with our mind’s eye, indicating that we use these two processes very differently in our own social lives. That is, directly looking at faces and people may be used to explicitly convey our own internal thoughts and emotions to others, whereas covertly attending to them may be used to discreetly gather information around us without revealing our immediate intentions to others.
I had a great time at the Healthy Brain for Healthy Lives Research Day learning about the amazing work we’re doing on delivering implementable and clinically effective outcomes for brain health. I’m also honoured that my talk Within-individual oscillatory patterns in mind wandering and attentive states are associated with functional life outcomes was selected as the Best Oral Presentation of the day!
Touched to have received the Michael Quek Teaching Assistantship award for my work in Cognitive Development over the Fall. I’ve definitely missed teaching classes over my PhD given the external awards I’ve held over the past few years, and it’s good to know my general moxie and nerdiness still lands!
Chapter 1 of my dissertation has finally been published in Psych Research! In the first line of my dissertation work, I investigated the prevailing notion that faces and eyes spontaneously bias attention, and across four studies (an additional three of which did not make it into the publication), I demonstrate the fragility of these systems within laboratory tasks. These findings really highlight that attention to social information is likely only engaged when it’s relevant to our task, rather than being ‘on’ for faces all the time.
This paper has been years in the making given how difficult null findings are to publish but I’m really proud of how well this came together. With Chapter 2 being in R&R at the moment, let’s see if I can go 4 for 4 at the plate this year!
Over this past summer, I was hired by SR Research as part of my NSERC CD-CREATE funding for a four-month industry internship, running from May to August. My primary project involved integrating SR Research’s eye trackers with various EEG equipment in order to evaluate visual experiences and neural patterns together in naturalistic task settings. Over the past few months, I traveled back and forth to their site in Ottawa for training, and worked with various labs in Montreal and Kingston to detail a workflow that could be used as an industry standard for the optimal integration of eye tracking data and EEG brain activity.
It’s been amazing working with the company and I gained such a great deal of knowledge about their hardware since I was physically building and co-registering computers and equipment together. Their support staff and engineers are also the best in the business and I can’t sing their praises enough!
At the end of my internship, I wrote up a technical manual that details how to interface the eyetracker with various EEG systems and coded a few programs on MATLAB and Experiment Builder that could be used as example cases to test the system. SR Research is planning on eventually using this as part of their industry standard document on co-registration and I can’t wait to see the final project come together after months of hard work!
Had a great time presenting my work on attentional selection of faces at VSS in St. Pete Beach this past month. The more that I work the conference circuit and talk about our non-replication of the social attentional bias, the more I realize that others have had similar issues in mimicking this supposedly robust effect. It’s great to have validation of our methods, but it’s equally as astounding to think of the number of file-drawer studies that were prematurely retired because the original effects were thought to be robust across all conditions and tasks. Will be excited to hear the feedback we get on the paper once it’s published!
Excited to see my first Spotlight Series feature published on McGill Psychology Department’s website! This has been a pet project of mine for about a year now since there are many inspiring stories out there on the unsung graduates in our department, and I’m happy to shine some light on them and their work. For the first article in this series, I sat down with PhD candidate Kristin Horsley to talk to her about her work with Universities Canada and Cossette Health to advocate for interdisciplinary research in Canada. Funding for the sciences is so vital to move us forward as a society and it was great chatting to her about the amazing work she’s doing in this area.
It was wonderful to spend time at the OPAM and Psychonomics conference in Vancouver, B.C. this month. Had some great conversations about my new method of analyzing temporal fluctuations in mind wandering, and the exciting research definitely made up for the non-stop rainy days there!
The 2nd issue of McGill Psychology Department’s newsletter is out! This was certainly a labour of love on my part, from trying to craft the design and theme to celebrating the incredible research we have in our department. Thanks to everyone who contributed their ideas and suggestions, and excited to hear your feedback!
Being part of McGill University’s new NSERC CD-CREATE grant has afforded me the incredible opportunity to attend a workshop on Nonlinear Dynamic Analyses, taught by University of Cincinnati’s Drs. Michael Richardson and Paula Silva. I could not recommend this workshop highly enough! Between recurrence quantification analyses and cross and joint domains, this analytical toolset has really broadened my statistical perspective and made me think outside-the-box on how I can examine temporal effects across all my dependent measures, from accuracy to RT to eye tracking to EEG. Can’t wait to get started on my own data analysis here!
My new paper on social attention just got through the final publishing hurdle and is now out for public consumption! Really proud of the novel methods we used here to show that social reward through praise and positive feedback biases our spatial attention, demonstrating that complex social signals can directly influence our cognition and behaviour.
Highly thankful to our Action Editor for really pushing us to use some complex statistical analyses for our paper. Though it’s easy to stick to tried-and-true methods, this process made me revisit some of my old favourite stats textbooks from Jacob Cohen and really helped me learn a slew of new techniques from the Bayesian world.
Had an incredible time at BrainCamp with the Kavli Summer Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Santa Barbara, California these past two weeks. Between meeting new colleagues from all around the world, talking to world-renowned scholars, dissecting a human brain, and learning new methodologies to expand my own work in attention, this experience was completely beyond what any academic and researcher could ever hope. Grateful for my time there and excited to put my new skills to use!
Quite proud of the History of Psychology timeline our cognitive cohort put together in our Psychological Methods class this month. Working with JSON for the first time with the TimelineJS API was quite informative and I loved the flexibility we had when building this interactive retrospective!
I had a phenomenal time with CSPC Science Meets Parliament program last week, where brilliant researchers across Canada met with MPs & Senators on the Hill, bringing together the people generating knowledge in Canada with those who use it for the public good.
It was my first year being on the SMP Organizing Committee this time around and I loved talking about my past experience in the program and getting to work behind the scenes to help researchers understand the pivotal part we play in Canada’s policy-making landscape. SMP was easily the highlight of 2023 for me, and the fact that I can say that again this year is in no small part to the stellar team I get to work with who make this job immensely fun – shout outs to this amazing crew and can’t wait to grow the program with you all in the future!
I had a whirlwind of a week in Ottawa this past week, representing the University of Waterloo and Queen’s University, and meeting with MPs as part of the CSPC Science Meets Parliament program. The program brought together Tier 2 CRCs, Independent Indigenous Researchers, & Banting Postdoctoral Fellows to strengthen the connection between science & policy communities and learn about how scientific evidence is used for policy making in Parliament.
It was amazing to see the love for research and innovation at some of the highest levels of government, and I was thrilled to meet with Dr. Mona Nemer, Chief Science Advisor of Canada, Valerie Bradford, MP for Kitchener South-Hespeler, and numerous others. I cannot think of better people to champion the great scientific work we do here in Canada!
A hearty thanks to everyone involved in organizing this phenomenal event and helping us build lasting connections with other diverse researchers and with parliamentarians and their staff. I’m excited to put my new scicomm and policy skills to work!
Had a great time working on the layout and graphics for McGill Psychology Department’s Virtual Poster Board, to recognize all of our undergraduate thesis students this year who were not able to present in-person for Undergraduate Research Day. Although physical distancing might have kept us all apart, I’m glad we have this living online document of the tremendous work they all put in.
Really excited that I got to flex my digital media skills and put together a Virtual Convocation video from our various faculty members to celebrate this milestone during these physically-distant times!
As part of a reflection on the Black Lives Matter movement and our collective and ongoing fight against institutionalized and structural Anti-Black racism, the McGill Psychology Department allowed me to use the June edition of our Spotlight Series to interview researchers in the department who specialize in how individuals perceive and evaluate one another across group boundaries. It was great to talk to faculty member Dr. Eric Hehman and Vanier Scholar Eugene Ofosu about the impact of communicating norms at individual, group, and institutional levels, and to contribute to the conversation on how to be an ally for historically excluded groups.
This project took a bit of a backseat given my dissertation writing these past few months, but I’m thrilled to relaunch the Spotlight Series feature for the McGill Psychology Department this month! In this monthly feature, I interview graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in our department and craft profiles on them and the work that they do. It’s been amazingly fun flexing my writing skills and crafting work for a more general audience, and I’m excited for everyone to read some of the features we have coming up over the next few months!
Excited to see my first Spotlight Series feature published on McGill Psychology Department’s website! This has been a pet project of mine for about a year now since there are many inspiring stories out there on the unsung graduates in our department, and I’m happy to shine some light on them and their work. For the first article in this series, I sat down with PhD candidate Kristin Horsley to talk to her about her work with Universities Canada and Cossette Health to advocate for interdisciplinary research in Canada. Funding for the sciences is so vital to move us forward as a society and it was great chatting to her about the amazing work she’s doing in this area.
Had a great time talking to Wendy Philpott at the Faculty of Arts for a feature article on my Lupina Foundation Postdoctoral Research Award. It’s been great getting some more press on the new smartphone application that I’m programming and launching in the next few months, and the novel ways it can bring the laboratory into the real world.
A big thank you to Dr. Laura Mickes for covering my latest publication with Dr. Monica Castelhano on the Psychonomics Society Featured Content section. Our study focused on how attention is distributed within real-world environments by examining the degree to which our attention can be biased by other objects either within or outside our area of focus. I was really proud of this work since we were able to come up with completely new variables that captured both early and late stages of attentional biasing, meaning I got to play around with some really fun graphing techniques!
This is the first of our three part series on the Surface Guidance Framework, so look for more on this work soon!
A big thank you to Trevor Nace and Emily Spear, editors at Science Trends, who featured my dissertation work as an article on their platform. It’s been great getting some press on this research showing that although spontaneous attention to faces may be less robust than we expected, it’s also much more complex than we realized!
I was lucky to be featured in the Spotlight section of Queen’s Psychology Department’s newsletter for the month of August. A big thank you to Eric Brousseau for the lovely picture and great write-up of my work.
This past month was filled with a large push to finalize some manuscripts and it’s been interesting to switch between a methods paper, a special issue article, a meta-analysis, a review, and a commentary piece. The mental gymnastics were certainly fun to stretch out the writing muscles and I’m hopeful my co-authors and I get to share these papers more broadly soon!
More exciting research news for the start of the year since Chapter 4 of my dissertation is officially out in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance. This was the final chapter from my dissertation left to be published and I’m really proud of this beast of a study that incorporated 6 separate experiments covering behavioural, eye tracking, and bayesian analyses!
My findings are also really captivating because this work shows that spontaneous attentional biasing to faces is biased by the external content factor of perceived facial attractiveness, and not other content factors like global luminance or featural configuration, demonstrating that attractiveness in faces is rather critical in eliciting these effects. My findings also further highlight the utility of reconceptualizing attention as an integrative system that can be influenced and controlled by not just stimulus factors and task information, but also internal preferences and personal experiences.
Wonderful research news to start the year, with Chapter 3 of my dissertation being published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics! In this chapter, I further probed whether the external factor of frequency may be responsible in preferential and spontaneous attentional biasing towards faces and eyes. We found our prior trend of dissociations between overtly looking at faces with our eyes and covertly attending to them with our mind’s eye, but we also specifically found that face novelty promotes more spontaneous biasing towards the eyes of infrequently presented faces!
Great to have the first of my mind wandering papers out with my wonderful colleague Lauri Gurguryan. This work started 5 years ago as part of her undergraduate thesis project when she was working in our lab, and although it was stuck in triage for quite a while, we’re glad to finally see this in press.
One of the projects Lauri and I worked on was why we see such disparate outcomes of mind wandering behaviours, such that some individuals might have negative consequences when their mind wanders, whereas others have benefits. We thought that these differences might be due to internal characteristics, such that some people might have better control over how and when their mind wanders, which then allows them to use mind wandering for strategic purposes. Our paper in Frontiers found exactly this – individuals who have a lower ability to regulate and control their attention experience more negative outcomes across work / academic performance when they mind wander, and those who have higher ability experience more positive outcomes.
Although this paper was years in the making, we’re really proud to have this piece out as a prelude to our forthcoming papers characterizing temporal dynamics in mind wandering to predict real world outcomes.
Chapter 2 of my dissertation is currently out in the open access journal Vision! In this chapter, I further probed what factors may be responsible in preferential and spontaneous attentional biasing towards faces and eyes, and investigated visual context through background scene information. It seems like seeing faces in embedded environments does in fact enhance more overt measures of social attentional biasing (i.e., when eyes are free to move).
We also found interesting dissociations between directly looking at faces with our eyes and covertly attending to them with our mind’s eye, indicating that we use these two processes very differently in our own social lives. That is, directly looking at faces and people may be used to explicitly convey our own internal thoughts and emotions to others, whereas covertly attending to them may be used to discreetly gather information around us without revealing our immediate intentions to others.
Chapter 1 of my dissertation has finally been published in Psych Research! In the first line of my dissertation work, I investigated the prevailing notion that faces and eyes spontaneously bias attention, and across four studies (an additional three of which did not make it into the publication), I demonstrate the fragility of these systems within laboratory tasks. These findings really highlight that attention to social information is likely only engaged when it’s relevant to our task, rather than being ‘on’ for faces all the time.
This paper has been years in the making given how difficult null findings are to publish but I’m really proud of how well this came together. With Chapter 2 being in R&R at the moment, let’s see if I can go 4 for 4 at the plate this year!
My new paper on social attention just got through the final publishing hurdle and is now out for public consumption! Really proud of the novel methods we used here to show that social reward through praise and positive feedback biases our spatial attention, demonstrating that complex social signals can directly influence our cognition and behaviour.
Highly thankful to our Action Editor for really pushing us to use some complex statistical analyses for our paper. Though it’s easy to stick to tried-and-true methods, this process made me revisit some of my old favourite stats textbooks from Jacob Cohen and really helped me learn a slew of new techniques from the Bayesian world.
So thrilled to show off our official name and logo for the Queen’s Attentional Dynamics Laboratory or the QuAD Lab for short. A big thank you to graphic designer Eric Brousseau for the mock up and can’t wait to get the space up and running once construction is complete!
I’m also so excited with how well my office space has come together too. Between the purple walls and all the orphan plants I’ve been taking in, it’s definitely become my cozy work spot this year. A big shout out to local Kingston artist Little Daydreamer for some great pixel art to help keep my head in the clouds!
I had a phenomenal time with CSPC Science Meets Parliament program last week, where brilliant researchers across Canada met with MPs & Senators on the Hill, bringing together the people generating knowledge in Canada with those who use it for the public good.
It was my first year being on the SMP Organizing Committee this time around and I loved talking about my past experience in the program and getting to work behind the scenes to help researchers understand the pivotal part we play in Canada’s policy-making landscape. SMP was easily the highlight of 2023 for me, and the fact that I can say that again this year is in no small part to the stellar team I get to work with who make this job immensely fun – shout outs to this amazing crew and can’t wait to grow the program with you all in the future!
Now that the ink is officially dry, I’m beyond thrilled to announce that I’ll be returning to my alma mater Queen’s University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology in January 2024!
Kingston definitely became a second home to me after I left Dubai in 2004, and I’m feeling incredibly thankful that my academic journey has brought me, Josh, & little Loki back to where we started. I’m very much looking forward to reuniting with old friends, getting to know new colleagues, and building a diverse group to study attention in all of its tempporal, functional, and computational glory!
Grateful to all of my mentors who helped me get here – Dan Smilek, Sylvain Baillet, Jelena Ristic, Debra Titone, and Monica Castelhano – and to the amazingly talented undergraduate and graduate students that I’ve worked with over the years – I owe you all some delicious Kingston churros in the future!
A big thank you to Dr. Laura Mickes for covering my latest publication with Dr. Monica Castelhano on the Psychonomics Society Featured Content section. Our study focused on how attention is distributed within real-world environments by examining the degree to which our attention can be biased by other objects either within or outside our area of focus. I was really proud of this work since we were able to come up with completely new variables that captured both early and late stages of attentional biasing, meaning I got to play around with some really fun graphing techniques!
This is the first of our three part series on the Surface Guidance Framework, so look for more on this work soon!
I was lucky to be featured in the Spotlight section of Queen’s Psychology Department’s newsletter for the month of August. A big thank you to Eric Brousseau for the lovely picture and great write-up of my work.
The learning curve when transitioning my mind wandering lecture to an online format was certainly quite steep and I’m not embarrassed to admit that it took me the better part of a day to figure out how to record and upload a 2hr lecture for the summer session of Cognition without constantly starting and stopping or talking with my hands! Suffice to say, I have a much greater appreciation for professors and lecturers who do this every day. Hats off to you all!
Touched to have received the Michael Quek Teaching Assistantship award for my work in Cognitive Development over the Fall. I’ve definitely missed teaching classes over my PhD given the external awards I’ve held over the past few years, and it’s good to know my general moxie and nerdiness still lands!
This past month was filled with a large push to finalize some manuscripts and it’s been interesting to switch between a methods paper, a special issue article, a meta-analysis, a review, and a commentary piece. The mental gymnastics were certainly fun to stretch out the writing muscles and I’m hopeful my co-authors and I get to share these papers more broadly soon!
A big congratulations to Alyssa Smith, one of the graduate student trainees in my lab, for being awarded with Best Oral Presentation at CSBBCS’s Annual Meeting this past week! This is the second year in a row that one of our graduate trainees has won a student award at CSBBCS and it speaks highly to the calibre of interesting research that our students are leading and the incredible presentation skills and story-telling abilities they possess! I feel like such a proud parent!
Beyond thrilled to announce that I was awarded the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2022-2024! Although I was officially told about the results back in February, the announcement of the award has been under wraps until all the paperwork could be settled and I finally get to scream it out into the void now!
It’s hard to put into words what an award like this means to me – as an academic, the validation of my work is incredible; as a first-generation scholar, the access to resources is immense; and as someone who had never really seen herself represented anywhere in science, the ability to be in such a significant position for my students and others in the field makes me a bit speechless. Although I put a lot of hard work and time and effort into the application, I’m also incredibly thankful to all of my many mentors and advisors who supported me in getting here. I owe you all many bagels and cupcakes!
Had a great time talking to Wendy Philpott at the Faculty of Arts for a feature article on my Lupina Foundation Postdoctoral Research Award. It’s been great getting some more press on the new smartphone application that I’m programming and launching in the next few months, and the novel ways it can bring the laboratory into the real world.
So excited to be one of nine applicants selected from the University of Waterloo to be passed forward for a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship! The entire process has involved a lot of moving parts, and I’m very grateful for all of the feedback from colleagues who have helped me get this far!
Had a great time presenting virtually at CSBBCS this year, and debuting some of the new recurrence methods I’ve been able to apply to my mind wandering data. Though I definitely miss the in-person component of these conferences, I loved the platform the CSBBCS execs decided to use this year, and the graduate committee also put together some wonderful social get-togethers on GatherTown. Phenomenal job all around!
I’ve been working on an exciting new communication platform for the Vision & Attention Laboratory using NodeJS, Embedded Javascript, and WebRTC APIs these past few months. The data collection on these projects is going to be massive, involving behavioural, video, audio, and eye tracking metrics, and just wanted to give everyone a little sneak peek before we go live later in the Fall term!
Just finished a great three-day workshop from CenterStat as an Introduction to Structural Equation Modeling. Cannot recommend this course highly enough as Drs. Dan Bauer and Patrick Curran did a phenomenal job keeping everyone engaged and interested through the theoretical processing and linear algebra content, and I’m definitely excited for the rest of their statistical training line-up this summer!
Since the start of the year, I’ve been involved with Simply Neuroscience, an international non-profit outreach society that empowers young students to get involved in the cognitive sciences through education, outreach, and awareness. As a Senior Academic Mentor with the Action Potential Advising Program, I’ve just been paired with 1 high school and 1 undergraduate student to introduce them to academia and research, and provide them with educational advice as they navigate their early career in the sciences.
Remembering how overwhelming academia can feel at the start of my career, it’s great that I now have the opportunity to give back and be a mentor to others in the field!
A big thank you to Drs. Jérôme Sackur and Vincent de Gardelle for inviting me to the Subjective Correlates of Cognition group this week for a talk! I presented my work from McGill and UWaterloo that identifies unique patterns of fluctuations between attentional and mind wandering states, and the utility of recurrence techniques to uncover differential relationships within these patterns. It was great hearing their feedback and getting their expertise in these techniques, and I am forever thankful to online video communication platforms for allowing me to present in Paris from my apartment in downtown Montreal!
One benefit of teaching yourself and re-learning analytical techniques is coming up with fun ways to apply these methods to new data so that you can play around with parameters. Which essentially means that I stayed up until 4am applying recurrence quantification analyses to A Song of Ice & Fire!
Recurrence plots are a great way to depict repetitions within any kind of time series data, and if we create recurrent plots for all of the viewpoints we hear from in all five books, and then separate these based off of the Characters versus the Houses they represent, there’s such a fun difference in patterns here.
Within the recurrence plots POVs grouped by Characters, we can see a very clear white band that only occurs in Book 4 and Book 4 alone, showing a lack of repetitions in this book from the characters we met in Books 1-3, and supporting this idea that George R. R. Martin introduced A LOT of new characters in Book 4. But interestingly, when you look at recurrence plot POVs grouped by Houses, these bands disappear, and instead you get almost a shift throughout the plot, with darker regions in Books 1-3 compared to lighter regions in Books 4 and 5. What this suggests is that these viewpoints may not have been the detour we quite felt when reading the books, and instead there’s just been a general trend towards hearing from lesser known characters from houses we already know and love (or loathe).
If Martin ever comes out with Books 6 and 7, it’d be great to see if we revisit these Character POVs or see a change in which Houses we hear from over time, likely on account of some families becoming less important (or on account of their untimely deaths). But in the meantime, it’s been fun to work with RQA methods again and revisit some of my favourites from these books!
