Topic of Research Seminar: Modeling Mental Representations: From Visual Perception to Motor Control

Abstract: The brain represents incoming sensory information and allows us to draw meaning from what we see and hear. Mental representations of knowledge and sensory information form the basis for cognition and action. My research seeks to understand how knowledge is represented in the brain from two perspectives: vision and motor control. During my doctoral work, I used psychophysics, fMRI, and computational modeling to study how visual information is represented – from low-level features like textures to higher-level concepts such as objects and words. I developed an efficient paradigm for collecting similarity judgments and used it to compare perceptual and neural representational spaces. In my current work, I apply similar neuroimaging and analytic approaches to the study of motor control in children born without one hand. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), surface electromyography (sEMG), and ultrasound imaging, we study how the brain encodes intended hand movements when the hand is congenitally missing, and how these signals can be decoded from the muscles of the residual limb. Taken together, this line of research illustrates how combining behavioral, neural, and computational approaches can provide insight into representational principles in the brain while also informing biomedical questions such as prosthetic design.

Subject field of Topic: Biomedical Engineering

Name of Speaker: Dr. Suniyya Waraich

Professional Rank of Speaker: Postdoctoral fellow

University Email of Speaker: [email protected]

Focal person contact: [email protected]

Date and Venue: 8th Sep 2025 from 1030 hrs to 1130 hrs in the seminar hall, School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering (SMME), NUST Islamabad