Principal Investigator

Russell Epstein

Russell A. Epstein, PhD
Professor of Psychology
Goddard Laboratories, Office 522
epstein[at]psych.upenn.edu | CV

I am a professor in the psychology department at Penn and I'm pleased to work with all the fine folks below. I got into this business somewhat by accident: after an undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in computer vision with Alan Yuille at Harvard, I wandered into a postdoc with Nancy Kanwisher at MIT just around the time that fMRI was taking off. I then spent 2 years working with John Duncan at the MRC-CBU in the other Cambridge before coming to Penn in 2002. When I'm not thinking about scenes, places, and the brain, I like to talk about politics and ponder the meaning of the word "representation" over a glass or two of beer.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Zhengang Lu

Zhengang Lu, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow, Psychology
zhengang[at]sas.upenn.edu

My research goal is to understand how the human brain makes sense of a complex visual world. Our world is a "blooming, buzzy confusion". However, we can perceive and understand our world in a rapid and seemingly effortless way, such as knowing where we are and where we are going. My ongoing project in the lab seeks to understand the neural mechanisms of human navigation by combining functional brain imaging, computational, and virtual reality techniques. Before joining the lab, I studied the neural representations of faces and scenes.

Michael Peer

Michael Peer, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow, Psychology
mpeer[at]sas.upenn.edu
Website

I am a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow in the lab, and I study how the human brain represents large-scale environments. In contrast to small laboratory settings, navigation in the real world involves processing of complex, segmented, and hierarchical environments; my research uses fMRI, VR environments and testing of real-world knowledge to understand how these processes are performed in the brain. In addition, my work attempts to understand how spatial representations are related to relational memory in other complex knowledge domains, such as social relations and encoding of time. Previously, I did a PhD as an Eshkol fellow at the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem, where I developed applications of resting-state fMRI to diagnosis of clinical neuropsychiatric disorders.

Chris Gahnstrom

Chris Gahnstrom, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow, Psychology
cgahn[at]sas.upenn.edu

I am interested in fundamental and generalizable neural mechanisms underlying cognition. To this end, the field of spatial navigation is especially exciting because it allows us to design experiments using complex yet ecologically valid task paradigms. I use various methods from computational modeling and fMRI to investigate flexible behavior and neural representations in spatial and non-spatial domains. As part of my postdoc, I will work on neural representations of space, reinforcement learning models, and hierarchical planning. Before joining the lab, I completed my PhD as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at UCL in the lab of Prof. Hugo Spiers where I investigated spatial goal coding in stochastic environments and planning in large state-spaces with licensed London taxi drivers. I have also worked in value-based decision making with Prof. Tobias Donner at UKE in Hamburg, Germany.

Anna Shafer-Skelton

Anna Shafer-Skelton, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow, Psychology
ashafers[at]sas.upenn.edu

My research aims to understand when/how we form integrated representations of our 3D environments through navigation and visual exploration. How might these representations change depending on our current goals or long-term experience with an environment? What reference frames and what types of visual information might contribute? Before joining the Epstein lab, I completed my PhD with Tim Brady and John Serences, studying working memory for scene-specific representations, as well as neural representations of the 3D geometry of scenes. As a lab manager with Julie Golomb, I investigated the reference frames of different types of visual representations as we visually explore and interact with the world.

Graduate Students

Tony Han

Linfeng (Tony) Han, B.S.
Graduate Student, Psychology
hanlf[at]sas.upenn.edu

My current research focuses on the interplay between perception and spatial cognition. For example, how does the perception of landmarks or local visual environments affect global spatial learning? How do humans integrate visual scenes from multiple viewpoints into a unified spatial representation? Besides these questions, I am also broadly interested in how humans represent spatial and non-spatial contexts, and whether these representations share similar neurocognitive foundations. I aim to explore these questions using a combination of behavioral testing, functional neuroimaging, and computational modeling. Beyond science, I am an amateur pianist, photographer, and Starbucks “been there” series collector.

Research Specialists

Tamar Japaridze

Tamar Japaridze, B.A.
Research Specialist & Lab Manager, Psychology
tamarjap[at]sas.upenn.edu

I am interested in how internal representations of objects within a scene may contribute to forming cognitive maps and aid in navigation of such spaces. My interest in cognitive neuroscience developed while I was an undergraduate studying neuroscience at Colgate University. While there, I worked on research studying the organization of scenes based on early neural responses, as well as completed my thesis on individual differences in aesthetic responses to art. Before joining the Epstein lab, I spent a year working in a Visual Attention lab at CU Denver. Now I’m excited to learn about all aspects of spatial navigation research, from research design to methodology to data analysis.

Lab Alumni