marius cătălin iordan
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We often come across never before seen objects, scenes, and semantic concepts, such as when driving down an unfamiliar street among unfamiliar cars. However, these unique novel objects don't flummox us, since we interact with them as examples of familiar categories (car), which we have learned and honed across years of experience.

My work uses functional neuroimaging (fMRI), real-time neurofeedback, and machine learning to explore how the human brain builds and learns categories from groups of items, how we use them to generalize old experiences to novel situations, and how to control and influence category representations to improve our interactions with the world.