Colloquium Artificial Intelligence - Dr. Julia Kam, University of Calgary

Title: Establishing the Electrophysiological Correlates of Mind Wandering and Detecting its Occurrence

Abstract:

An inevitable feature of our conscious experience is that our minds often shift away from task demands to our inner milieu. Another core feature of our thoughts is that they dynamically shift from topic to topic. Both are considered different types of mind wandering. With growing recognition that mind wandering is highly prevalent in our everyday life and linked to wide ranging impacts on our daily functioning, there has been a surge of interest in understanding its neural basis. In this talk, I will discuss the electrophysiological correlates of both types of mind wandering. I will further review work that combines machine learning and EEG to detect episodes of both types of mind wandering. Taken together, this work highlights objective markers of mind wandering, which can reliably predicts its occurrence.

Short bio:

Dr. Julia Kam is an Associate Professor of Psychology and a full member of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary. She completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Her lab aims to develop a mechanistic model of the neural basis of internal attention, and to ultimately drive the development of tools that optimize attentional control. In particular, the lab studies how the human brain processes internal representations and aims to translate this research to applied and clinical contexts, including predicting attention states in the real world and studying this in psychiatric and neurological populations.