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, computational, and neuroimaging tools as a means of understanding how the brain organizes complex human behaviors. CV

Research Staff

Postdocs

• Tom Collins

  Tom Collins' work at the Lab involves tonal and temporal models of cognition. He completed his PhD at The Open University, UK, in 2011. The main topic of his doctoral research was computational methods for the discovery of repeated patterns in music. Recent publications include an investigation into attributes that make a collection of repeated notes perceptually and music-analytically important, and a comparative evaluation of different algorithms for discovering repeated patterns. More material relating to Tom's research can be found here . In spare time, Tom plays football, tennis, and the piano.

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.

• Brian Hurley

  Brian is a graduate student in the Department of Psychology's Perception, Cognition, and Cognitive Neuroscience area. His research interests involve using music as a stimulus to understand how humans perceive and act upon rhythmic auditory signals and how such behaviors arise in the brain. Brian received his undergraduate degree in Psychology at The University of Texas at Dallas, where he studied memory for melodic and rhythmic patterns in Jay Dowling's laboratory. Since joining the Janata Lab, Brian has also developed an interest in how attention and temporal expectancies affect different aspects of the musical experience. Aside from academics, Brian enjoys playing piano and exploring the Northern California outdoors with his wife, Kristine.

• Ben Kubit

  Ben is a graduate student in the Department of Psychology's Perception, Cognition, and Cognitive Neuroscience area. He received his undergraduate degree in cognitive science from Case Western Reserve University where he studied attentional processes as well as social/moral cognition with Anthony Jack in the Brain, Mind and Consciousness Lab. His research interests involve using music as a means of investigating interactions between, and characteristics of, various cognitive processes. Outside of academics, Ben enjoys playing percussion, listening to music and exploring the outdoors.

• Jeff Rector

  Jeff is a first-year graduate student in Psychology. Prior to joining the Janata Lab, Jeff received a B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University and paid his dues working in book publishing and software development while living in San Francisco. When he's not working, reading, or listening to music, he's doing other stuff.

Current Undergraduates

• Victoria Van Dinh
• Sonia Bains
• Corey Chomas
• Livon Ghermezi
• Terence Tyson
• Hannah Whiteside

Former post-docs, graduate students, and research staff

• Sonja Rakowski
• Julia Grieser
• Bradley Vines
• Noah Marchal
• Ana Navarro
• Jason Golubock
• 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.