Assistant Professor
 Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Neuroscience
Goergen Institute for Data Science
University of Rochester


Research Interests
Visual and Naturalistic Cognition
Learning and Neural Plasticity
Computational Neuroscience

 Naturalistic Cognition Lab

 cora(@)rochester.edu

 @coralineiordan.bsky.social

 Google Scholar

 she/her

Travel and Presentations

2024


Jul 3 BCS REU Seminar
Rochester, NY
Aug 6-9 CCN                  
Boston, MA
Aug 15-17 CVS Symposium
Rochester, NY
Sep 13 BCS Retreat
Bristol, NY


2023


Jul 31 BCS REU Seminar
Rochester, NY
Aug 28 BCS Retreat
Canandaigua, NY
Nov 16-19 Psychonomics
San Francisco, CA

coraline rinn iordan
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about me
I'm an Assistant Professor in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences & Neuroscience Departments at the University of Rochester. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, working with Jon Cohen, Ken Norman, and Nick Turk-Browne. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Vision and Learning Lab at Stanford University, co-advised by Fei-Fei Li and Diane Beck. My academic journey started at Williams College with a B.A. in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Cognitive Science.

research brief
I'm a computational cognitive neuroscientist who studies how we people understand and remember stories and events. My research uses complex naturalistic stimuli (e.g., movies, podcasts), together with behavioral assays, neuroimaging (fMRI), real-time neurofeedback, & computational modeling and analysis.

lab culture
  • Our lab will always be a safe + inclusive + welcoming space for everyone, including trainees, collaborators, and participants.
  • We believe that diversity of backgrounds, identities, & perspectives greatly strengthens our ability to tackle research as a team.
  • We believe that respect, support, kindness, & work-life balance are prerequisites of a productive lab environment.
  • We believe in collaboration over competition.
  • We value individually-tailored mentorship highly and we always strive to learn from one another.

                             


news
12/2024. New Publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): Sculpting New Visual Categories into the Human Brain. We use real-time fMRI neurofeedback to write new visual categories into neural patterns in the human brain and elicit corresponding changes in subjective perception.
11/2024. New Publication in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Inducing Representational Change in the Hippocampus through Real-Time Neurofeedback. We use real-time fMRI neurofeedback to alter and combine human memories.
08/2024. New Conference Proceeding at Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN): Event Similarity and Word-Level Salience Predict How Humans Summarize Naturalistic Narratives. We show that perceived event structure and transformer-based attention measures explain how people summarize information from complex narratives.

05/2023. I am grateful to have been awarded the University of Rochester College Course Development Fellowship for the course I will be teaching in Fall 2023: Advanced Topics in Cognitive Neuroscience.

08/2022. I am incredibly happy and grateful to announce that I'll be starting a new adventure in January 2023 as an Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester, with joint appointments in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences & Neuroscience Departments.

05/2022. Presenting a Talk at the Vision Sciences Society (VSS) 2022 Annual Meeting: Sculpting New Visual Concepts into the Human Brain.
02/2022. New Publication in Cognitive Science: Context Matters: Recovering Human Semantic Structure from Machine-Learning Analysis of Large-Scale Text Corpora.

We show that incorporating semantic context into the training procedure of word embedding models improves prediction of empirical similarity judgments and feature ratings.