Note: I’m currently migrating my website, so not everything works just yet, but it should soon.

Welcome! I’m John Kiat, a Project Scientist with Steve Luck at the Laboratory for Basic and Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis. Lover of all things electrical in the brain.

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

My research typically involves combining (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.

Oh! And 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. How cool is that!