Trainees in the CABI lab have been busy presenting work from the lab the last couple of weeks! Graduate student Cara Charles and lab manager Maddie Valdez both presented at their first in-person conference at Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco!

Undergraduate research assistants Shawn Obarski and Saisha Birr each presented at UWM's undergraduate research conference last week.

Congrats to all for their great work! Special congratulations to Shawn who is graduating - we will miss you!

A new paper examining age effects on category learning has just been published in the journal Memory. Stemming from Cait's time in the Brain and Memory Lab at the University of Oregon, this paper shows age deficits in category learning, but no additional age deficit in category generalization above-and-beyond the learning deficit. Follow this link to read more!

The Psychology Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is hiring! We have an opening for a tenure track position in behavioral neuroscience. Come join a group of neuroscientists working across human and animal models, with research focusing largely on learning and memory. UWM is a unique institution with both a strong R1 research focus and a mission to promote educational access in the state of Wisconsin. See the job posting below and contact Cait with questions.

Link to the job ad

Our new paper showing both abstract and specific concept representations in the brain is now in press at eLife. Check it out here: ​https://elifesciences.org/articles/59360

We have a new review paper out now in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. The paper is titled 'Generalization and the hippocampus: More than one story?' and focuses on different conceptualization of how generalized memories are coded in the hippocampus.

We are excited to announce that Cait will be joining the psychology faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in January 2021!  Check out her faculty page!
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Her lab, the Cognition, Aging & Brain Imaging (CABI) Lab, will be recruiting Ph.D. students to start in Fall 2021 and a lab manager to start in Summer 2021. If you are interested in either of these positions, please use the 'contact' tab above to discuss possibilities with Cait. Applications for the Ph.D. program are available here and the deadline for submission is December 1, 2020.

​Cait has a new preprint available co-authored by her post-doc advisor Dasa Zeithamova and an undergraduate research assistant in the bamlab, Takako Iwashita. In it, they show that categories can be represented both by individual exemplars and abstract prototypes within the same task. Both representations can form in parallel across distinct regions of the brain, with inferior prefrontal and lateral parietal regions representing exemplars, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex and anterior hippocampus representing prototypes.

Preprint is available for download here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.26.117507v2

Cait and Dasa have a new paper published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition! In it, they show that training on coherent sets of category examples facilitates later generalization, even to items at the category boundary. They also show greater reliance on abstract category representations following coherent category training.

The paper is available in journal format at https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2020-13876-001.html or in manuscript format at https://psyarxiv.com/7g2q5/

Cait is in Chicago for the Society for Neuroscience's Annual Meeting. You can see her work presented as part of Dasa Zeithamova's talk Saturday afternoon in the Brain Mechanisms of Concept Learning minisymposium. She will also present the below poster Tuesday afternoon - come see her at poster BB34!