People
Principal Investigator
- Petr Janata
Petr Janata is a cognitive neuroscientist studying the
psychology of music. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon
in 1996, where he performed electrophysiological studies of auditory
object representations in the barn owl brain and musical image formation
in the human brain. As a post-doctoral fellow at the University of
Chicago from 1997-1999 he used electrophysiological and computational
approaches to investigate song-perception and song-learning in
songbirds. From 2000-2004 he was on the research faculty at Dartmouth
College where he resumed his long-standing line of music perception
research, initiated as an undergraduate at Reed College and continued as
a Fulbright Scholar in Vienna, Austria. Since 2004, he has been a
faculty member of the Center for Mind and Brain, and the Department of
Psychology, at UC Davis, where he continues to use music and an array of
behavioral and neuroimaging tools as a means of understanding how the
brain organizes complex human behaviors.
Research Staff
- Stefan Tomic
Stefan Tomic is involved in various research projects
and provides computer programming expertise in the Janata lab. He is researching
and developing tools for analyzing various aspects of rhythm and meter. His rhythm analysis tool,
codeveloped with Petr Janata, can be downloaded by following
this link.
Additionally, he developed Ensemble, a suite of
utilities for developing and presenting psychology experiments, and Mesh
Display Tool, a utility for visualizing meshes and calculations used in
EEG/MRI source estimation models. He received his M.A. in
Electro-Acoustic Music from Dartmouth College in 2003. His studies
included electro-acoustic music composition, auditory perception, audio
digital signal processing, and physical modeling of musical instruments.
For several years, Stefan worked as a system administrator for the
University of California at Santa Cruz and University of California,
Berkeley. He also holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University
of California, Santa Barbara. - Noah Marchal
Noah Marchal is an interdisciplinary artist with an MFA
from Rensselear Polytechnical Institute and a BFA from The School of the
Art Institute of Chicago. His works blurr the lines traditionally held between science and the arts. Noah is
interested in the semantics of languages, both as patternistic
representations and as syntaxical rulesets as found in music. His work
is focused on participatory structures of language, such as those derived from musical
experience and perception. Noah has professional and artistic interests
in the fields of media history and politics, autism and learning, as
well as bio-technical aspects of cell culturing and botany. His work
draws reference from bio-technology, media artifacts and history,
cognitive science, spirituality and symbolism, and the field of human
computer interaction.
Postdocs
Graduate Students
- Fred Barrett
Fred Barrett is a graduate
student studying psychology in the lab of Petr Janata, in the
Perception, Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience section at UCD. He
studied Music Education, Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience as an
undergraduate student at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. After
graduating from Temple, he worked as a research assistant in the
Schizophrenia Research Center and Brain Behavior Laboratory at the
University of Pennsylvania, assisting in studies of emotional expression
and recognition, and cognitive functioning. Through graduate study, he
plans to pursue study of the emotional experience of music. Fred plays
the trumpet, guitar, drums and violin, and has performed in professional
punk, metal, salsa, and wedding bands, as well as in amateur and
volunteer orchestral and jazz groups. When he is not studying,
conducting research, or playing music, you can find him spending time
outdoors with his wife Sarah, studying Aikido, or possibly
meditating.
- Jason Golubock
Jason Golubock is grad student of cognitive science with a background in computer science and software engineering. His PhD thesis is an exploration of auditory working memory for nonverbal stimuli, such as musical instrument sounds. Jason studies cognitive science as a means toward a better understanding of the mind and the nature of consciousness itself. Other research interests include neural networks, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interfaces. Jason is an avid bass player and mountain biker who doesn't worry about robots taking over the world.
- Ana Navarro
After beginning my degree in Psychology, I specialized in Cognitive Science at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. I worked for several years as a scholarship-holder under Professors Ramón López-Higes and Sara Fernández Guinea on research involving linguistic processing while at the same time beginning my doctorate in 2004 in the same department. My experience with music began when I was eight years old in the "Conservatorio de Albacete" in Spain where I studied clarinet and piano and then continued in Madrid with classes in saxophone and jazz. Currently, I am working in Petr Janata's labratory at UC Davis, where I came for the 2005-06 school year as a visiting student through the EAP program. My main interests are language comprehension and syntactic processing and, in general, cognitive functioning, with an emphasis in the auditory system.
Current Undergraduates
- Burke Rosen
- Nakisa Choupani
- Chris Tinker
Former post-docs and graduate students
- Julia Grieser
- Bradley Vines
