Bryan J. Medina

About

I am a postdoctoral fellow at Basis Research Institute, where I am a member of the Collaborative Intelligent Systems (CIS) team.

My PhD research asked how people remember the everyday sounds of the world, and how prior experience shapes what we perceive and remember. In large-scale online experiments, listeners heard a continuous stream of environmental sounds, music, and auditory textures and reported whenever a sound repeated. I then built an ideal-observer model in which a sound’s memory trace, stored in a perceptual representation of natural sounds, changes as new sounds are heard and is shaped by a learned prior over natural sounds. Finally, I led cross-cultural studies with listeners in the United States, a small town in Bolivia, and remote Tsimane’ communities, using memory errors to ask whether the perceptual similarity of music is shared across cultures.

At Basis, I am interested in whether behavior can give us access to internal state. In rats, the behavior we can measure comes in two streams: calls, such as alarm and social calls, and movement, such as where rats go and how they move between shelter, open ground, and burrows. Internal states like arousal or fear are hidden behind both. I work with multimodal recordings of wild urban rats (audio, plus video and thermal tracking), which capture both streams at once. I am asking how calls and group movement relate, and how much calls alone can tell us about what a group of rats is doing.

I received my PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT, where I worked with Josh McDermott in the Laboratory for Computational Audition and with Ila Fiete. I was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and an MIT Dean of Science Fellow. I earned my BS in Computer Science, Cognitive Sciences, and Mathematics from the University of Central Florida, and in 2019 I did computational neuroscience research with Rob Kass at Carnegie Mellon University.

When I’m not thinking about rats, I’m probably practicing alto saxophone or electric bass, digging through records, or wondering how jazz musicians manage to listen to each other and improvise together in real time.