Project: How do the human brain make decisions, especially decision regarding the categories of something...As a team under Dr. Thomas Carlson, we seeked to understand the mechanics behind decision making in terms of the visual pathways in our brain. It takes human about 300 ms to recognize something, in another words make a decision about what something is, but even before those 300 ms, our brain is already firing to build up that decision. We found that the inferior temporal cortex is partly responsible for the build up for that decision. We uncovered this using machine learning and building a representative mathmatical model that simulate what the brain does when it makes a decision!

My Contribution:
I was responsible for gathering the behavioral data using amazon mechanical turk, it was the labs first time using the amazon mechanical turk service for this purpose. Additionally, I was responsible for data analysis using linear discriminant analysis and building out the mathematical models around the decision making process. The project was one part experimental, another part theortical.