I investigate the neural correlates and behavioural mechanisms that underpin how people interpret unpleasant situations and apply effort to avoid unpleasant situations. I am also interested in computationally modelling biases and affective states that contribute to evaluations of effort cost, with the aim of better understanding the roles that differing cognitive mechanisms, and mood disorders, play in people’s perception of effort. Furthermore, I help conduct a variety of fMRI data analysis projects, focusing on multivariate analyses of representations of affective stimuli. I am co-supervised by Dr. Rebecca Todd and Dr. Alan Kingstone. Additionally, I collaborate with Dr. Kiran Soma on statistical analyses of local steroid regulations in rodents. I also collaborate with Dr. Tim Murphy in the UBC Department of Psychiatry to develop computer vision methods to track animal behaviours in real time, and segment mesoscale calcium images in mice into functional brain regions.
Hamden, J. E.*, Gray, K. M.*, Salehzadeh, M., Kachkovski, G. V., Forys, B. J., Ma, C., … Soma, K. K. (2021). Steroid
profiling of glucocorticoids in microdissected mouse brain across development. Developmental Neurobiology, 81(2), 189–
206. https://doi.org/10.1002/dneu.
Forys, B. J.*, Xiao, D.*, Gupta, P., & Murphy, T. H. (2020). Real-time selective markerless tracking of forepaws of head-
fixed mice using deep neural networks. eNeuro. https://doi.org/10.1523/
Forys, B.*, Xiao, D.*, Gupta, P., Boyd, J. D., & Murphy, T. H. (2018). Real-time markerless video tracking of bodyparts in
mice using deep neural networks. BioRxiv, 482349. https://doi.org/10.1101/482349
*First co-authors