PAC Lab

2025 Highlights

December

• December 9-13: Lab graduate student Alejandro Gamba was accepted to (and attended) the CIFAR Neuroscience of Consciousness Winter School.

November

• November 19: The online version of a new collaborative paper on how to use transcranial ultrasound to study consciousness is now available at this link. The lab has plans for how to expand experimental work in this area, so if you are interested, please feel free to reach out and get in touch!

• November 14: Joseph Pruitt, a 5th-year graduate student in the laboratory, received news that he has been awarded a UF CLAS Dissertation Fellowship funded by the Charles Vincent and Heidi Cole McLaughlin Endowment. CONGRATULATIONS TO JOEY!!! These fellowships are extremely competitive. Bravo!

October

• October 7: Saurabh Ranjan, the lab’s first PhD student, recently finished up some interesting work investigating vividness reports in humans and LLMs using two well-known imagination questionnaires: the VVIQ-2 and the PSI-Q. Using psychological network analysis, he has some interesting findings to report! You can find the link to the paper and a short description of the project from Saurabh on BlueSky at this link.

August

• August 21: At our lab orientation to start the semester, we welcomed 20 new undergraduate research assistants that will be working in the laboratory during the 2025-2026 academic year! Welcome Daniela, Carly, Ehan, Melanie, Johana, Lauren, Catalina, Laura, Aarav, Angus, Maeyda, Isabella, Kayla, Evodie, Alberto, Emelie, Anjali, Lindsey, Isabela, and Eliott. Looking forward to the year ahead with all of you!

July

• July 16: Today, at the International Multisensory Research Forum in Durham, UK, Dr. Odegaard gave a talk titled, “Multisensory Integration Follows Subjective Conference.” This work was led by Yi Gao at Georgia Tech, in the lab of Dobromir Rahnev. Yi will soon be off to start a faculty position at the University of Nebraska-Omaha next. Congrats, Yi!

• July 11: We have some new thoughts to share on using transcranial ultrasound to study consciousness! In a paper with Dan Freeman, Seung Schik-Yoo, and Matthias Michel, we talk about this novel method and outline ways in which it can be used to probe important questions in consciousness research. Check out our preprint here.

• July 8: Today, at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting in Heraklion, Dr. Odegaard presented a poster based on Saurabh Ranjan’s thesis work titled, “Reality Monitoring in Human Minds and Machines.” Thanks to all of the conference attendees that braved the heat and stopped by the poster!

June

• June 26: Alejandro Gamba’s first paper as a graduate student in the lab is now ready to share! Using behavior, fMRI, and AI algorithms, he evaluated and compared representational spaces for different similarity properties. He showed that two different representational spaces can be identified from properties based on similarity judgments: 1) an object-based space and 2) a subject-based space. General similarity judgments account for the object-based space. Further, only object-based properties and high performance DNNs correlate significantly with multiple brain regions regardless of distance or correlation method. Check out the link to his preprint here.

• June 23: The lab’s first postdoc, Doyeon Lee, has officially accepted an offer to become a faculty member at Middle Georgia State! CONGRATS, DOYEON!!! You will be missed, but we are so excited for you to take this next step in your career!

• June 10: Dr. Odegaard presented the lab’s research at the annual ONR performance review, held both online and in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

• June 3: Congratulations to the lab’s first graduate student, Saurabh Ranjan, on a successful PhD defense yesterday! Saurabh’s dissertation is titled, “Reality Monitoring in Humans and Artificial Intelligence: A Behavioral and Computational Perspective on False Memories.” Saurabh will be working on final edits on his written thesis in June, but in the meantime, he is also traveling to present at the Frontiers in NeuroAI Symptosium at Harvard University this week, too. Great job, Saurabh!

May

• May 27: Congrats to Doyeon and Joey on their new Perspective publication in PNAS Nexus! Back in 2024, our lab started having conversations about how metacognition (and specifically, metacognitive sensitivity) could inform joint decision-making between humans and AI. Those discussions led to this piece, which draws upon insights from the literature on joint decision-making in humans to argue that metacognitive sensitivity in AI must be measured to know (1) when to trust it, and (2) how to incorporate its advice to make optimal decisions. We look forward to feedback on this work!

• May 17: The lab has a busy Saturday upcoming at the Vision Sciences Society annual meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida! In the Saturday morning session, graduate Student Saurabh Ranjan will present his poster, “Visual imagination networks in humans and large language models.” In the Saturday afternoon session, graduate student Alejandro Gamba will present his poster, “Understanding the representational geometry of psychological and neural spaces across multiple similarity dimensions.” Finally, in the Saturday evening talk session, Dr. Odegaard will present a talk titled, “The theory of subjective inflation in peripheral vision: accept, reject, or revise?”

• May 2: Dr. Odegaard traveled to the Society for Philosophy and Neuroscience 1st Annual Meeting at Washington University to give his talk titled, “Is the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness Pseudoscience, or are All of the Critics Wrong?”

April

• April 30: With the semester winding down, the lab is ready to celebrate several undergraduate research assistants that are moving on to their next opportunities! Dakota Gober has accepted his offer to begin the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Master’s Program UNF, Peter Zeledon is starting a master’s program at Glasgow University, and Jordan Harbour has been accepted into the UF Masters of Medical Science program (with a concentration in neuroscience) for this next fall. Well done, everyone! We look forward to hearing more good news in the months ahead.

• April 17: The lab had three successful undergraduate posters at the Psychology Graduate Student Organization poster day! Maeyda Bilal led a poster with co-authors Rebecca Neisler, Jack McDonald, and Joseph Pruitt on the effects of trial-by-trial feedback on detection and confidence in the periphery. Angus Macgregor led a poster with Trevor Caruso on underconfidence in the visual periphery. And Allison Soule led a poster with Lauren Sahnchez, Lindsey Zhuang, and Alejandro Gamba on how working memory load shapes motion perception. The poster from Allison’s team won FIRST PLACE at event! Congrats to all on these successful presentations!

• April 1: Lab graduate student Alejandro Gamba traveled to the Cognitive Neuroscience Society annual meeting in Boston this week to present his poster titled, “Understanding the representational geometry of psychological and neural spaces across multiple similarity dimensions. You can see and read more about his work at this link that he posted on BlueSky!

March

• March 14: We are excited to share the lab’s latest project, which replicates and extends the work of John Grimes (1996) on the relationship between change blindness and saccades. This project is the culmination of several years of investment from the lab, including the stellar contributions of the lab’s first lab manager (Addison Sans) and second lab manager (Ryan Faulkner). With release of this preprint, congrats to Addison and Ryan for their first authorships on a lab paper!