Janata Lab

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. In 2010 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2010-11 he spent a year in Prague as a Fulbright Fellow. CV

Postdocs

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 and psychology from Case Western Reserve University where he studied attentional processes and social cognition with Anthony Jack in the Brain, Mind and Consciousness Lab. His research in the Janata Lab focuses on understanding the retrieval and re-experiencing of music-evoked autobiographical memories in terms of interactions between brain networks. Ben’s work addresses questions about how episodic memories are bound to musical memories, the role of attentional focus during music-evoked autobiographical memories, and how the brain functionally represents and organizes music-evoked memories across time.

Graduate Students

Angela Nazarian
Angela is a graduate student in the Department of Psychology’s Perception, Cognition, and Cognitive Neuroscience area. She received a B.A. in Psychology and Music Industry from the University of Southern California. Her previous research at USC included multimodal prediction of psychological disorders, emotion and affect in human–computer interactions, natural language dialogue, and cultural psychology. Angela’s academic interests lie at the intersection of music and psychology. Her current research in the Janata Lab consists of semantic and contextual analysis of music evoked autobiographical memories.

Former post-docs, graduate students, and research staff