What is going on at the Sheldon Lab?
August 2024: This month, we say goodbye to two visiting students our lab hosted over the summer.
Marcel Kokoszka—a graduate student from SRH Hochschule Heidelberg—did impressive work on memory encoding of concepts, and Sharaya Hill—an undergraduate student from the University of Alberta—joined as part of the Indigenous Mentorship and Paid Research Experience for Summer Students (IMPRESS) program!
March 2024: Hey all! Some news! We are in collaboration with ReImagineAI to help develop Conversational User Interfaces for older adults with memory decline. Applying what we know!!
https://www.reimagine.ai/reimaginehealth
November 2023: Congratulations to Dr. Lauri Gurguryan for successfully defending her dissertation and completing her Ph.D.! To celebrate, our lab prepared balloons and went out for a team dinner. 🥳🍾
October 2023: Kicking off the fall semester with our first lab activity—bowling! 🎳
August 2023: Memory is a distortion and a matter of perspective. Is this a very large mushroom or a very small Keanu?
November 2021: A BIG congratulations to Dr. Sarah Peters for successfully defending her PhD dissertation! We look forward to your continued success and to our future collaborations!
May 2020: Congratulations to our graduate students Azara Lalla and Can Fenerci for receiving the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQNT) doctoral funding. Can also received funding from Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives (HBHL), McGill University.
December 2019: Holiday Time! Here is a glimpse into our memory-making Holiday dinner, complete with a gift steal game!
September 2019: The Sheldon Memory Lab { https://www.sheldonmemorylabatmcgill.com/ ] at McGill University is looking for a post-doctoral fellow to join our team!
The Sheldon Lab investigates the cognitive and neural processes that support autobiographical memory, how these processes extend into non-memory scenarios like problem solving, and how they are recruited differently across individuals and populations (e.g., aging, patient populations). We are looking for a post-doc who is highly motivated, curious and knowledgeable about the cognitive neuroscience of memory and interested in working with a wonderful team of young researchers. The successful candidate will have a PhD in cognitive psychology or in a related field, and will have experience with neuroimaging analysis, preferably fMRI. We are recruiting for a one-year term, however there may be the opportunity to renew the position based on grant funding and performance.
In this position, the post-doc will collaborate on a research project that collects fMRI measures of younger adults learning and recalling complex autobiographical-like memories as well as measures of individual differences (musical training, imagery). The post-doc will have the opportunity to link these two measures together and also extend the project to other populations (aging), as well as to design and conduct new experiments relevant to the focus of the lab. The post-doc will be encouraged to collaborate with researchers, take advantage of workshops on neuroimaging analysis, attend talks and conferences, and apply for grants.
Review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. For more information about this position, please contact Dr. Signy Sheldon. { signy.sheldon@mcgill.ca }
McGill University is located in Montreal (Quebec, Canada), a diverse and vibrant city, and is a wonderful place to learn and live. There are several research centers devoted to neuroscience that use innovative techniques and tools to answer important questions about topics like memory.
April 2019: It is time for some of our undergraduate Sheldon Lab-ers to move on to Grad school and their future endeavors! Here we are, bowling our socks off! What did the hippocampus say when it left the lab? Thanks for the memories!
Sending our undergrads off with some grad school survival goodies!
March 2019: We have been having a lot of fun with science this spring! We also recently took some time to visit a retro arcade! It goes us all thinking about the power of nostalgia. Do people with memory loss experience that feeling? Is nostalgia linked to positively rewarded memories? Hmm …
Dec 2018: A couple of ‘news-worthy’ articles
Dr. Sheldon gives some tips on how to effectively study to the MCGILL TRIBUNE: http://www.mcgilltribune.com/sci-tech/the-power-of-effective-studying-31218/
Dr Sheldon also talked to NEW SCIENTIST magazine about how memories are recalled differently across individuals: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032011-300-memory-special-how-can-two-people-recall-an-event-so-differently/
I wonder if I have memories?
Congratulations to Elizabeth DuTemple on winning second place in the Behavioural Sciences, Psychology, & Social Sciences category at the Faculty of Science’s 14th annual Undergraduate Research Conference (URC) on October 4, 2018. Her poster entitled “Space, the Final Frontier?: The Effects of Contextual Boundaries on Temporal Memory” presents results on a series of experiments that she conducted with Lauri Gurguryan. This work describes how contextual information can alter the way temporal information is encoded. Interestingly, Elizabeth and Lauri found that space is NOT the final frontier as non-spatial and spatial contextual information at encoding has comparable effect on temporal memory. Quick, someone tell Patrick Stewart …
A big congratulations to Dorothee Schoemaker who beyond successfully defended her PhD Thesis entitled “Investigation of familiarity performance as an early cognitive marker of Alzheimer’ Disease neurodegeneration” Dorothee was a student of Jens Pruessner and then joined the Sheldon Lab durng the last two years of her PhD.
SEE YOU SOON Stephanie!
Our superstar research assistant Stephanie Simpson is headed to University of Toronto to start her graduate career. We will miss her dearly and can't wait for our next encounter. Like we always say: "Once part of our team, always part of our team!".
PhD candidate Sarah Peters's poster presentation at the 2018 International Conference on Learning and Memory in California.
PhD candidate Lauri Gurguryan's lightning talk at the 2018 International Conference on Learning and Memory in California.
Throwback Thursday to when our graduate students Sarah Peters and Lauri Gurguryan presented their work at the 2018 International Conference on Learning & Memory in California earlier this summer!
PhD candidate Sarah Peters presented a poster on "Comparing And Contrasting The Neural Mechanisms Of Autobiographical Memory And Problem Solving" and PhD candidate Lauri Gurguryan gave a lightning talk on "The dynamic nature of autobiographical memory retrieval is a matter of detail".
Left Our former Undergraduate Honour's student Carina Fan, Middle PhD candidate Sarah Peters, Right PhD candidate Lauri Gurguryan
Stephanie presented her wonderful work on the impact of emotion on autobiographical memory at the International Congress of Applied Psychology Conference (2018).
JAMOVI
Here at the Sheldon Lab, we are big fans of JAMOVI - an open source statistical software package that is built on top of R. It is great! It is free! It is open-source!
https://www.jamovi.org/
Signy led a wild symposium on the interplay between detailed remembering and forgetting at the 2018 International Conference on Learning and Memory. There were some rousing discussions on when and why we remember details from the past versus forget them.
Three of our undergraduate students (Willem Le Duc, Elizabeth Dutemple & Lisa-Marie Giorgio) presented their projects at the Undergraduate Research Day, which is a day long research event to celebrate the hard work and excellence in ongoing undergraduate research at McGill. If you want to learn more about the fabulous work they have been carrying out in the lab you can visit: Abstracts or Our Team.
Cool! Signy was interviewed for Quebec Science. Funny enough, she doesn't speak French well enough to read it! Time to get those language lessons happening, tout suite!
http://www.quebecscience.qc.ca/reportage_qs/Memoire-infidele
Our lab had a delicious cookie exchange this week to celebrate the end of the term. There was some very creative baking happening! When science and food and fun collide!
Maria D'Angelo came in from Toronto to teach the lab about how to best use R for data analysis and visualization. It was extremely helpful and really fun! A good way to fight back against the winter blues!
We are all so excited that Dr. Sheldon will be chairing this symposium at the UC Irvine International Conference on Learning and Memory. Cool!
http://learnmem2018.org/
Educart interview!
Dr. Sheldon appears as a neuroscience expert on the recently launched Educart initiative from the Musee Des Beaux-Arts. She provides a neuroscience perspective on several works on art, helping break down walls between art and science!
Congratulations to Lauri Gurguryan, our superstar Master's student who received a travel award from the CRBLM to present her research at the annual SFN meeting in Washington, D.C.. Her work suggests there are distinct hippocampal mechanisms that support autobiographical memory that depend on the nature of recall.
Congratulations to Stephanie Simpson for her submission, titled "The Interaction Between Episodic Memory and Mood", has been Highly Commended in the Psychology category of The Undergraduate Awards Programme 2017! So honored to have her as part of our lab!
WE MOVED!!
Our lab has moved to a beautifully window-ed new space! We can't wait to get our research engines revving here!
SEE YOU SOON SONJA CHU and CARINA FAN!
Sonja Chu (on the right) and Carina Fan (on the left) are both headed to University of Toronto to start their graduate careers. We will miss them in the lab and look forward to future visits and collaborations! Once part of our team, always part of our team!!!
