Who am I?Who am I?
I am an Associate Professor at UC Davis in the Psychology Department and Center for Mind and Brain.
You can also visit my Center for Mind and Brain page here or
my lab homepage.
In the fall of 1996 I taught an animal behavior class at my alma mater, Reed College, after which I did a post-doc in Dan Margoliash's lab at the University of Chicago studying how birds learn to sing.
From 2000 until 2004 I was in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College as research faculty. During my time at Dartmouth my main collaborators were Barbara Tillmann and Jamshed Bharucha.
My research interests are primarily in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and
neuroethology.
I use music as a model system for studying the neural basis of auditory
attention, imagery, and memory; in particular the ways in which these
general functions support the formation and evaluation of
expectancies. More recently, I have started working on the relationship between music, emotion, and memory by studying music-evoked autobiographical memories. In a related project I am investigating the relationship of music to spiritual experiences.
I use a variety of tools in my work including electrophysiological recordings (single-unit, EEG, ERP), functional brain imaging (fMRI), behavioral measures, and computational modeling.
When I'm not working, chances are that I am off skiing or playing music. Check out Hardwater, the Davis band I played in!
In October 2003, I had the amazing experience of skiing on sand dunes in Qatar
and 4 days later skiing knee-deep powder in Austria.
For an engaging perspective on me and my work, check out the cover story that ran in May, 2009 in the Sacramento News and Review.
In 2010-11 I spent a year in Prague for a year as a Fulbright Scholar working with Milan Palus at the Institute of Computer Science at the Czech Academy of Sciences. Currently, I am in Davis working on my Guggenheim Fellowship project.
e-mail: pjanata at ucdavis dot edu
phone: 530 297 4471
FAX: 530 297 4400
Page first created: August, 1994
Last modified:
December 14, 2011