Welcome! I’m John Kiat, a Research Scientist at the Laboratory for Basic and Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis. Aficionado of all things related to understanding the brain’s electrical patterns.

As a broad summary of my current work, I’m interested in understanding how our brains perceive the world around us and the factors that change how that all works. More specifically, I’m interested in understanding the time course of the processing and storage of real-world visual information and how various individual difference factors (i.e., developmental, emotional, etc.) moderate the activity of the systems involved.

My research typically involves combining neural data (most frequently electrical activity recorded from the scalp (i.e., electroencephalography (EEG)) with machine-learning techniques, eye-tracking, and cognitive behavioral testing, both in-lab and big data collection via crowdsourced platforms. I am particularly excited by finding interesting ways to apply cutting-edge analytic methods to EEG data to ask questions we could only dream of a mere decade ago.

If you’re curious, the pretty animation above shows the pattern of voltage across the scalp over 1.2 seconds as a person views a photograph of a real-world scene like the one below (averaged across 25000 trials), slowed down about 15x. Cool stuff!