Melbourne Computational Memory Lab

PI: Adam Osth

In January 2016, I began a position as a Lecturer at the University of Melbourne. Since then, I have been steadily developing my lab group.I received my Ph D from Ohio State University in April 2014. My Ph D was supervised by Simon Dennis and focused heavily on computational modeling of cognition and most of my work was focused on models of recognition memory and serial recall. In July 2014, I began a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Newcastle with Simon Dennis and Andrew Heathcote, where I became proficient with evidence accumulation models such as the linear ballistic accumulator (LBA) and diffusion decision model (DDM). In addition, I further developed my hierarchical Bayesian modeling skills and became proficient in differential-evolution Markov chain Monte Carlo (DE-MCMC) methods, which are well-suited for cognitive models. Outside of work, I spent my time playing guitar and my money on an ever-growing record collection. I’m also the proud father of two cats named Mabel and Bad Janet.

Graduate Students

Julian Fox

Hello there, my name is Julian. I am a 3rd year PhD student, currently being supervised by Dr Adam Osth. The focus of my research is understanding human memory, in particular, understanding how different types of memory and memory tasks can be explained by cognitive modelling. A large portion of the research conducted in my Honours year and throughout my PhD so far has been specifically concerned with the study of source memory. Source memory is a type of memory that involves remembering the context in which a stimulus was initially observed (e.g., the colour or location on a computer screen in which a word was seen). Despite source memory being a common topic of research, there is little understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying it. Osth et al. (2018) made the first step by extending the Osth and Dennis (2015) global matching model of recognition memory to source memory. One of the primary aims of my PhD will be to extend their model to a variety of phenomena in source memory, thus leading it to becoming the first fully-realized mechanistic model of source memory.

Jason Zhou

I am a 2nd year PhD student, co-supervised by Dr Adam Osth and Prof Philip Smith. My work saddles the fields of source memory and decision-making research, and I am aiming to use computational models to explore how memory and decision-making processes interact. More specifically, I am currently working on my first paper with my supervisors which applies the circular diffusion model (Smith, 2016) to a continuous response source memory task. Fingers crossed there will be more to come, so watch this space!

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