Assistant Professor
Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Neuroscience
Goergen Institute for Data Science
University of Rochester


Research Interests
Visual and Naturalistic Cognition
Learning and Neural Plasticity
Computational Neuroscience

 mci(@)rochester.edu

 Google Scholar

 she/her

Travel and Presentations

2024


Jul 3 BCS REU Seminar
Rochester, NY
Aug 6-9 CCN                  
Boston, MA
Aug 15-17 CVS Symposium
Rochester, NY
Sep 13 BCS Retreat
Bristol, NY


2023


Jul 31 BCS REU Seminar
Rochester, NY
Aug 28 BCS Retreat
Canandaigua, NY
Nov 16-19 Psychonomics
San Francisco, CA

coraline rinn iordan
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let me tell you a story

Our world unfolds in stories. There are stories we experience personally, stories we tell each other, and stories we tell ourselves. The magic of our mind is intertwined in how we generate countless such stories and how we glean useful information from every new story we encounter.

My lab's mission is to explore and explain how we construct, understand, and communicate our stories when we experience the world naturally, such as when we watch a captivating movie or when we talk to our friends about our adventures.

Because stories are brilliant and always moving, we study them using human experiments involving dynamic, complex naturalistic stimuli (e.g., movies, theatre productions, podcasts).

Because stories affect all avenues of our cognition, we study them anywhere they could be instantiated, including in human behavior, in the human brain, and in artificial neural networks.

Because stories are a whirlwind of incredibly complex patterns of information, we study their underpinnings using a diverse array of methods and experimental techniques, including machine learning, psychophysics, neuroimaging (fMRI), neural network models, and real-time neurofeedback (neural sculpting).

Some of the questions our lab is currently focusing on include:

    ♦     the neural and behavioral mechanisms of information summarization in complex narratives (Sun & Iordan, 2024)
    ♦     how anticipation of future events influences perception of naturalistic narratives
    ♦     how story immersion and sequential decision making affect event perception and comprehension
    ♦     the roles that prior experience and expertise play in story encoding and recall










additional research interests

I'm also broadly interested in how visual and semantic knowledge (e.g., objects, scenes, concepts, categories, events) is learned, organized, and modulated by attention in human behavior, in the human brain, and in artificial neural networks. Three research directions my lab pursues in this space are:

(1) investigating ecologically-relevant aspects of visual and semantic cognition (e.g., categorization, learning, efficient perception) in the brain and in behavior using neuroimaging (fMRI) and psychophysics (Iordan et al., 2015, 2016, & in prep).

(2) improving automatic prediction of human behavioral judgments and neural responses from large-scale human-centric data, e.g., by using deep neural networks applied to vast corpora of text, images, and empirical human judgments (Iordan et al., 2018 & 2022).

(3) probing the causal links between human neural representations and behavior and potentially improving human cognitive processes via neurofeedback and neural sculpting (Iordan et al., 2020; Peng et al., in press).