Serena Thompson Entering Class - 2004 E-mail: thom1712@umn.edu

Undergraduate Institution and Major/Degree:

• University of Southern California, BS, Biomedical-Electrical Engineering

Major Advisor(s):

• Dan Kersten, Ph.D.
• Cheryl Olman, Ph.D.

Research Description:

Low-level and object-salient features influence perception, but questions remain about how these features interact. We study the effects of contrast, luminance, and orientation of visual features on target detectability, and are pursuing experiments that investigate these features' relation to figure-ground assignment

We are also interested in how people learn to identify ambiguous objects using both behavioral and functional imaging techniques.

Lab Rotations:

• Babak Ziaie
• Walter Low
• Peter Steinmetz
• Daniel Kersten
• Kelvin Lim

Courses Taken Beyond the Core Courses:

• Mathematical Modeling of Human Behavior
• Several Vision Seminars and fMRI Seminars/Courses
• Signal Detection Theory
• Computational Neuroscience

Graduate Level Minor:

• Medicine

Conferences Attended:

• Society for Neuroscience, 2006
• Vision Sciences Society, 2006, 2007

Committee Members:

• Sheng He (chair)
• Daniel Kersten
• Cheryl Olman
• Geoff Ghose

Abstracts:

• J Hegdé, S Thompson, & D Kersten, "Psychophysical and fMRI studies of
  the role of prior knowledge in visual perception"

• J Hegdé, S Thompson, & D Kersten, "Object recognition in cluttered
  visual scenes: Is it better to learn objects in the presence or the
  absence of clutter?"

• Center for Cognitive Sciences trainee, 2004-5, 2005-6, 2006-7

Home Town:

• Kamuela, HI/Grand Forks, ND