Simon Lilburn and Giwon Bahg Moving on to New Opportunities

Simon and Giwon have been postdoctoral fellows working with Thomas Palmeri, Gordon Logan, and Jeffrey Schall on projects aimed at understanding and modeling monkey and human behavior, and monkey neurophysiology and electrophysiology in visual cognition. Simon has worked on developing ensemble models of perceptual decision making that jointly explain choice behavior, speed-accuracy tradeoffs, neural data, and confidence, developing a model of bottom-up salience that predicts behavior and neurophysiology to extend our recent models of top-down salience in visual search, and understanding relations between attention, memory, and serial order. Giwon has worked on developing a joint computational understanding of the relationships between behavior, neurophysiology, and electrophysiology, resulting in a model that predicts the time course of a key event-related potential (ERP) component associated with attentional allocation and target selection, the monkey analogue of the N2pc. He has also worked on developing a computational understanding of sequential decision making and ensemble perception.

Giwon will be moving to Pennsylvania State University in September for a postdoctoral fellowship with Roger Beaty, where he will study how large language models (LLMs) can be used to automate the assessment of creativity in natural-language-based tasks. He hopes to gain more insights into how to model high-level thought processes computationally and how LLMs can contribute to psychological understanding.

Simon is moving to the newly established College of Connected Computing at Vanderbilt as an Assistant Professor of the Practice. He will bring his computational and quantitative expertise to teach undergraduates across the university how to apply computation and data science to a wide range of disciplines. He will also maintain a Research Assistant Professor position in the department and plans to continue active collaborations with colleagues in Wilson Hall.

We wish Simon and Giwon the best in their new endeavors!

Alumni Updates

Zoë Barron

Starting fall 2025, Zoë Barron will work as lab manager in Dr. Cassandra Hendrix's Research on Early Environmental Factors (REEF) Lab at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. She will contribute to the management and execution of research on the ways in which early life experiences shape psychological risk within and across generations, using brain and behavioral data. Specifically, she will collaborate with a team of researchers to investigate how fetal autonomic nervous system development and functional neurocircuitry are impacted by variations in maternal prenatal stress.

Volunteering!

The admin team and grad students packed backpacks and supply kits on July 21st for Metro Nashville Public School (MNPS) students. This annual Summer Social Initiative was hosted by Vanderbilt Football and Athletics.

Nice work!

Remembering Keith Clayton

We are saddened to share the news of the passing of Dr. Keith Clayton.

Keith Neil Clayton died peacefully in his sleep on December 18, 2024 in Nashville at the age of 90. He is survived by his children Norman, Elizabeth, and Ben, several grandchildren, and his former spouse Burneta Clore Clayton.

Keith was loved by all who knew him. He was generous, kind, and funny. He was a loving father and grandfather, mentor and colleague. He had a great interest in what makes us human, with an academic focus on learning and memory, which he turned into a fruitful career, and he had a rich spiritual life.

Keith was born in Coffeyville, Kansas on May 8, 1934. He was the first in his immediate family to earn a college degree. After receiving his Bachelors and Masters in Psychology from Southern Methodist University, he received his PhD in Psychology from Northwestern University. Read More...