Research Seminar: Jacob Paul

The Speaker

Dr Jacob Paul is a cognitive neuroscientist at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, where he heads the Maths At The Human Scale (MATHS) Lab. His interests include numerical cognition (including dyscalculia), the neurocognitive development of maths reasoning, and visual perception. His research spans multiple levels of explanation from modelling longitudinal patterns of maths learning, to characterising individual differences in numerical decision making, and mapping the organisation of neural circuits underlying transformations of visual quantities.

Jacob completed a PhD in Psychology at the University of Melbourne supervised by Prof Robert Reeve and Dr Jason Forte with a thesis titled "Toward a refined model of eye movements in visual enumeration". His PhD research examined how we move our eyes to count sets of objects. He found eye movements were the product of low-level visual perception and high-level task strategies. His findings help refine models of numerical cognition and suggest ways eye-tracking may be used diagnostically to identify those who experience difficulties with basic calculations. Jacob undertook postdoctoral training with Prof Ben Harvey at Utrecht University (Netherlands) combining ultra-high resolution 7 Tesla fMRI and computational modelling to characterise how the brain encodes basic quantities like number and time. He also works on better understanding the visual and perceptual disturbances underlying Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD).

Jacob is passionate about translating his research findings to help enhance levels of "functional numeracy" in the general population, improve learning and instruction of mathematics, as well as constructing brain-based interventions and remediation programs for individuals with maths learning difficulties. He is currently an academic research fellow in the School of Psychological Sciences.

See here for more information.

The Seminar

In this event in a series, speakers from within the Hub, the University, and the broader research community tell us about their research. Our Research Seminar Series involves speakers covering a broad range of themes surrounding our Hub’s interests, so we’ll hopefully all learn something interesting. Whether you want to learn to inform your own research or to simply satisfy a personal curiosity, we hope to see you there.

Attend In-Person or Online

Where: Steve Howard Room 5206, Level 5, Melbourne Connect
Online: Join the zoom here Meeting ID: 881 8112 1134 Passcode: 081124