Oscar Solis
PhD student
Profile
Biography
I completed my undergraduate studies here at York with an integrated MSci degree in ‘Natural Sciences specialising in Neuroscience’. Throughout this time, I was a research assistant for Dr Karla Evans in the Complex Cognitive Processing lab, working on projects related to scene gist processing and crossmodal visual search. My final year undergraduate project was supervised by Dr Ines Hahn (Department of Biology) and Prof Alex Wade and involved recording and analysing steady-state visually-evoked potentials from fruit flies.
Career
- PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, Department of Psychology, University of York
(September 2024 to present) - Research assistant for Dr Karla Evans, Complex Cognitive Processing Lab, University of York (May
2020 to June 2024) - MSci Natural Sciences specialising in Neuroscience, School of Natural Sciences, University of York
(September 2020 to June 2024)
Research
Overview
Scene Complexity Perception and Image Memorability
Projects
Given two images, you can effortlessly judge which one would be more “complex”. Your judgement would even be consistent with those of other people’s. Recent work from our lab (Kyle-Davidson et al., under review), as well as others (e.g., Saraee et al., 2020) have shown that more complex images tend to be more memorable, and thus, the current project aims to investigate the neural correlates of this relationship.
We first reconsider human “complexity perception”, a term that is difficult to define and, even more so, to operationalise. There are many advantages to quantifying the complexity of an image computationally, but these often fall short of fully capturing what affords humans this perception (though see Kyle-Davidson et al., 2023). Tools such as these will then allow us to investigate the neural substrates and temporal dynamics of scene complexity perception and its relationship with image memorability. Understanding this relationship will give us insights into the mechanisms underlying our long-term visual memory, which we tend to take for granted in our everyday lives.
Research group(s)
- Complex Cognitive Processing Lab
Grants
- Departmental Studentship
Collaborators
- Dr Karla K. Evans (supervisor, University of York)
- Prof Alex Wade (supervisor, University of York)