Dr Ian Charest PhD

PhD

Dr Charest studied Psychology as an Undergraduate student at the University of Montreal (Quebec). In 2009, he finished his PhD on the neural mechanisms underlying voice and voice gender perception (supervised by Professor Pascal Belin). From 2010-2015, he completed a career development fellowship at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (MRC-CBSU), where he used neuroimaging to explore individual differences in brain representations of objects (together with Dr Nikolaus Kriegeskorte). The methods that he devised in this collaboration lead to studying idiosyncrasies in clinical populations. Together with Dr Kriegeskorte, he continued this work on representational idiosyncrasies, exploring visual object representations in the brains of volunteers with an Autism Spectrum Condition (in collaboration with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen). He joined the School of Psychology as a Lecturer in the summer of 2015.

Most recently, Dr Charest has taught an undergraduate module on the subject of neurodevelopmental disorders.

Dr Charest welcomes applications from talented and enthusiastic students who are interested in studying object representations in humans, and their underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. Applicants should have a research-oriented background in cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, computer science, or computational modeling. The lab has access to a wide range of research facilities, including a 3T MRI scanner, EEG systems and behavioural testing equipment. For informal enquiries about PhD and Masters projects please email i.charest@bham.ac.uk.

Dr Charest is generally interested in investigating high-level visual and auditory representations using neuroimaging techniques such as EEG, MEG and fMRI. He studies the neurobiological bases of individual differences in personality and behaviour, which might be reflected in cognitive-level object representations in temporal and frontal regions. Recently, he investigated how particular objects are represented in individual brains. Together with Dr Nikolaus Kriegeskorte at the MRC-CBSU, he developed the methodology for relating individual differences at the behavioural level to individual brain representations of mental content in cortical activity patterns. He showed that each person viewing a set of objects represents the objects uniquely in his or her brain. Moreover, given an individual’s measured brain-activity patterns, idiosyncrasies in his or her perception of the similarities among the objects can be predicted. Prediction accuracy is modest using current technology. However, these results demonstrate that fMRI has the power to reveal individually unique representations of particular objects in the human brain. The novel method might help us understand the biological substrate of individual experience in mental health and disease. Dr Charest also uses computational modelling and neuroimaging data to predict choice response times from psychophysical experiments. Using Deep Convolutional Neuronal Networks, state-of-the-art object recognition models can be related to human behaviour.