Arish Alreja

A new Journal of Neuroscience manuscript, Intracranial electroencephalography and deep neural networks reveal shared substrates for representations of face identity and expressions, featuring work led by our collaborators Emily Schwartz and Stefano Anzelloti at Boston College is now online. Classical views about the neural substrate of face perception suggest that the brain areas involved in identity and expression recognition are distinct and do not overlap. Emily tested this view by combining intracranial brain recordings from humans doing a face task, with deep neural networks trained to perform face identity and expression recognition. She observed that neural representations for both face identity and expression arise in brain areas that were previously thought to only contain one or the other. Congratulations Emily and Stefano!

Our submission Reconstructing the neurodynamics of face perception during real world vision in humans using intracranial EEG recordings has been accepted for a talk presentation at the Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting’s Face Perception: Neural Mechanisms and Models session on Wednesday, May 24th 2023 (10:45 am - 12:30 pm). I am looking forward to sharing some exciting new work with everyone in the vision research community! I hope you can make it.

In our new paper, A new paradigm for investigating real‑world social behavior and its neural underpinnings, we introduce recording & analysis methods for combining eye tracking, egocentric video, audio & intracranial recordings during natural, unscripted social interactions to study the neural basis of real world social perception. Careful consideration of informed consent and neuroethical considerations involved in recording unscripted natural behavior is an important issue addressed by this paper. Check out the twitter thread penned by co-author Michael Ward for a TL; DR

1/🧵 New Paper! 📢

Excited to welcome 1st author @ArishAlreja to Twitter & share our #iEEG & #eyetracking paradigm for ecologically valid study of the 🧠 basis of 🚨real-world🚨 behavior.

🆓Behavior Research Methods🆓 https://t.co/eLJLD2Eu5o

👇 Video = 👁 + 🎥 + 🔊 + 🧠🌊 pic.twitter.com/80zJfg6QUh

— Michael J. Ward, MS (@MichaelJWard) August 1, 2022

Our neurotheory paper Constrained brain volume in an efficient coding model explains the fraction of excitatory and inhibitory neurons in sensory cortices is finally live on PLOS Computational Biology. This work has a unique place in my heart because it was my first step into the field of neuroscience.

Excited to share a new preprint for a methods manuscript that describes a new paradigm to study the neural correlates of real world social behavior in an inpatient clinical setting using a combination of eye-tracking, audio, video and intracranial EEG recordings.

I will be presenting a poster titled Intracranial electroencephalography reveals neurodynamics underlying face perception during real-world vision in humans at this years Vision Sciences Society’s (VSS) “virtual” annual meeting during the poster session focused on Face Perception: Neural Mechanisms, on May 25, 2021 (Tuesday), 8:00 - 10:00 am EDT. I will describe new results that illuminate the dynamics of neural activity underlying face perception during real world vision in intracranial EEG patients using the novel real world vision paradigm we introduced last year at VSS 2020. This work was done in collaboration with the MultiComp Lab headed by Professor L.P. Morency at CMU and with Marcin Leszczynski from Professor Charles Schroeder’s group at Nathan Kline Institute.

I am excited to share a new preprint: Constrained brain volume in an efficient coding model explains the fraction of excitatory and inhibitory neurons in sensory cortices, on bioRxiv. This project is personally significant to me because it was my first project as a neuroscience neophyte and as the lead student. Check out the twitter thread penned by Chris Rozell for a fun TL;DR

I am grateful for the opportunity to give a talk about my research at this years Vision Sciences Society’s (VSS) “virtual” annual meeting. The talk is titled Intracranial electroencephalography reveals real world vision in humans is a contextually modulated, distributed, and active sensing process. The coordinates are Live Talk Session 2: 6/20/2020 (Saturday) @ 11:00:00 AM. I will describe a novel paradigm that we use to study real world vision in intracranial EEG patients and share some exciting preliminary results about information processing during real world vision and social interactions (emphasis on faces). This work was done in collaboration with the MultiComp Lab headed by Professor L.P. Morency at CMU. If you cannot make it to the talk, I will also be holding a zoom presenter conference at 6:00 pm later that day.

TL;DR I am happy to share the unofficial PNC coursework guide. This is a coursework roadmap for students on the Joint Ph.D. track in Neural Computation and Machine Learning at CMU. It is written for students in early stages of coursework. The roadmap aggregates insights from over a dozen PNC students about coursework combinations and sequencing of pre-requisites, all with the goal of minimizing stress and maximizing research productivity. Students who have completed coursework contributed their stories about good coursework choices as well as avoidable and painful mistakes, with the hope that future students can benefit. Click below for more!

I am excited to share that I have been awarded a fellowship to attend the 2019 Kavli Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience at U.C. Santa Barbara (affectionately known as Brain Camp). I am grateful to U.C. Santa Barbara, the Kavli Foundation and the summer institute directors and faculty for the opportunity. This year’s program will focus two topics, “Interactions between Network Models and Neural Representations” and “Computational Social Neuroscience”, both of which relate to upcoming projects at home in the Lab for Cognitive Neurodynamics. I am looking forward to connecting with peers and learning about cutting edge work in these areas from leading researchers including Danielle Bassett, Luke Chang, Leah Somerville and Read Montague.

I am the happy recipient of a travel award from Ripple to attend the 2018 SFN annual meeting in San Diego next month. A big thank you to Ripple for the support. Looking forward to presenting our poster at SFN. See you there!

I am the grateful recipient of the CMU Graduate Student Association/Provost Office Conference Travel Award for attending the 2018 SFN annual meeting. A hearty thank you to the CMU GSA and Provost’s office for their support. Looking forward to presenting our poster at SFN. See you in San Diego!