Welcome to our new students!

The Woolgar Lab is really excited to welcome new students to the group!. Annie, Ella and Dariush are all reading Cognitive Neuroscience and will explore various research questions using data generated within the group.

This year, I’ll be investigating how nonspeaking autistic individuals process and comprehend spoken language using MEG and EEG. By applying machine learning techniques to decode neural representations of linguistic features (from phonetics to semantics), I hope to better characterize individual differences in receptive language abilities that traditional behavioral assessments may overlook.

Annie Townsend

My MPhil in Cognitive Neurosciences project, supervised by Dr Moataz Assem, will use precision fMRI to quantify interdigitation of multiple demand and category/sensory-biased meso-scale activations. Specifically, we will quantify interlobar and individual differences in organisation.

Ella Jackson-Drexler

I am comparing event segmentation in humans and large-scale AI models during perception of natural stimuli. Specifically, I will analyze how a multimodal transformer’s surprise, along with other internal representations, predicts human-annotated event boundaries and aligns with transitions in movie-watching fMRI activity. I believe that understanding how AI systems’ perception of events and time differs from ours will support the effort to make them more capable and interpretable over longer task horizons.

Dariush Nashat