The SoNIC (“Science of Neural, Interpersonal Communication”) lab studies the neural and behavioral mechanisms that support real-life communication. We want to know:
How do our brains and behaviors become coupled to other people’s during everyday interactions?
How do our brains organize the statistics of natural sounds, like speech and music?
How do we adapt our voices to the demands of unique listeners?
NEWS
September 2024: Elise gives a talk at RIT Neuroscience: “An integrative, interpersonal approach to studying real-world communication”
September 2024: Elise gives a workshop on effectively evaluating “DEI statements” in graduate admissions and faculty hiring as part of the RIT/UR symposium, “Promoting Diversity in STEM”, featuring SPARK Society founder Ayanna Thomas
September 2024: Elise gives a Cognitive Science colloquium talk at the University at Buffalo
September 2024: The Brain & Cognitive Sciences (BCS) department at the University of Rochester has our second annual retreat at Bristol Mountain in the Finger Lakes region
August 2024: Meliora Fellow Aliza Lopez presents her work, on how paralinguistic features of speech adapt to different social contexts, in a summer research symposium
July 2024: Riesa Cassano-Coleman presents her work on how musical and emotional features drive perceived song similarity at the Society for Music Perception & Cognition conference in Banff
May 2024: The lab (along with Ed Lalor and Emily Knight) receives a University Research Award to study the fine-grained neural underpinnings of everyday dialogue!
April 2024: Undergraduate students Vahni Tagirisa and Carmela Lozano present their research on factors driving perceived musical similarity at the U of R Undergraduate Research Expo
November 2023: Riesa presents her poster, “A complex relationship between emotional features of familiar music and evoked autobiographical memories”, at Psychonomics in San Francisco
October 2023: Elise participates in an interdisciplinary panel at the Center for Language Sciences (CLS) at the University of Rochester, “Large Language Models: Boon or Bane?”
August 2023: Tamar Galvin presents her summer research conducted through a Wiesman Scholarship, “Conversational alignment between friends versus strangers”
July 2023: Sangeetha Ramunaj and Lili Seoror present their research completed in the summer REU program, “Computational Methods for Understanding Music, Media, and Minds”, through the Goergen Institute for Data Science
July 2023: Riesa Cassano presents a poster, “Quantifying the influence of musical features on perceptual similarity of popular songs”, at the CogSci meeting
July 2023: The SoNIC lab enjoys a retreat on Canandaigua Lake!
July 2023: Our review paper proposing novel, naturalistic ways to investigate musical communication, “Music as a window into real-world communication”, is published!
March 2023: The lab attends the Maple Sugar Festival at the Genesee Country Village & Museum!
March 2023: Ruby Zeng wins a “Best Poster Award” for her poster, “Adapting a Language Transformer Model to Capture Subjective Human Judgments of Narrative Creativity”, at the UR Graduate Research Symposium
February 2023: Riesa Cassano gave a talk at the Eastman/UR/Upstate NY Music Cognition Symposium
November 2022: Elise gave a talk at SCAN (the Symposium for Cognitive Auditory Neuroscience), on the theme of “auditory-motor synchronization in the context of speech and music”
September 2022: The lab is recruiting—come do science with us! Prospective PhD students and postdocs can check out the “Join us” page for guidelines
September 2022: Elise receives a pilot grant from the Schmitt Program in Integrative Neuroscience (SPIN) with Ed Lalor, on “Modeling the electrophysiology of speech and language processing in two-person neuroscience experiments of dialogue”
September 2022: Elise is featured in an article in The Atlantic about the benefits of singing to infants
August 2022: PhD student Riesa Cassano presented a poster, “Hierarchical processing of naturalistic music during production and perception”, at the Society for Music Perception and Cognition meeting
July 2022: PhD student Ruby Zeng presented a flash talk, “Using a language transformer model to capture creativity in improvised narratives”, at the CogSci meeting
June 2022: Our work on communication and neural coupling between adults and children is featured in Scientific American
May 2022: PhD student Ruby Zeng presented a poster, “Using a language transformer model to capture creativity in improvised narratives”, at the Society for Neuroscience of Creativity meeting
December 2021: Elise presented a talk, “A naturalistic approach to studying temporal processing during music performance”, at the Acoustical Society of America meeting
November 2021: PhD student Riesa Cassano presented a poster, “Hierarchical processing of temporal information during naturalistic music production and perception”, at the annual NeuroMusic conference
October 2021: Our review paper, “The development of communication across timescales”, has been published in Current Directions in Psychological Science!
June 2021: Elise presents a talk, “Interpersonal synchrony: A framework for understanding communication, learning, and creativity in real life” in the Goergen Institute for Data Science (GIDS) Summer Colloquium Series
June 2021: Our paper, “Neural synchrony predicts children’s learning of novel words”, is published in Cognition
May 2021: The lab welcomes Derek Lilienthal and Rachael Tovar, visiting students in the NSF REU program, “Computational Methods for Understanding Music, Media, and Minds”, at the Goergen Institute for Data Science!
December 2020: Elise presents a talk, “Using naturalistic paradigms to study music performance and learning”, at the Eastman Music Cognition Symposium.
July 2020: Our preprint, “Neural synchrony predicts children’s learning of novel words”, is out in bioRxiv! We also presented these results at ICIS 2020.
June 2020: Our team (w/ Uri Hasson, Marius Cătălin Iordan, and Jamal Williams) has received a GRAMMY Museum® Grant to study the neural underpinnings of naturalistic music performance!
May 2020: Our paper (w/ Mira Nencheva and Casey Lew-Williams) investigating how moment-to-moment prosodic dynamics drive pupil synchrony and word learning has been published in Developmental Science
January 2020: Our work characterizing child-caregiver neural coupling and dynamic tracking of real-time communicative behaviors has been published in Psychological Science