Karen Tian -

I am a cognitive neuroscientist studying visual perception. How do our brains make sense of the visual world while giving rise to subjective experience? What neural dynamics support perception as it unfolds across time? I study these types of questions using psychophysical, neuroimaging, and computational methods. I am a postdoctoral researcher with Rachel Denison at BU, where I recently completed my PhD. Before then, I was an RA with Marisa Carrasco at NYU and did my undergraduate studies at Yale. In some intervening years, I worked in visual design. I like to draw many things, but am often asked to draw brains.

Selected publications and preprints

Zhu, J, Tian, KJ, Carrasco, M, & Denison, RN.

Dynamic cortical routing mediates temporal attention. bioRxiv.

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Tian, KJ*, Motzer, JA*, & Denison, RN.
Voluntary temporal attention improves perception even in the absence of temporal competition. bioRxiv.
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Tian, KJ*, Maniscalco, B*, Epstein, ML, Shen, A, Graham Castaneda, O, Kurosawa, T, Motzer, JA, Olsson, E, Russell, EE, Walsh, ME, Wang, J, Bek Awrang Zeb, T, Brown, R, Lamme, VAF, Lau, H, He, BJ, Brascamp, JW, Block, N, Chalmers, D., Peters, MAK^†, & Denison, RN^†.
When awareness outstrips performance: critical tests of subjective inflation under inattention. bioRxiv.
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Zhu, J, Tian, KJ, Carrasco, M, & Denison, RN. (2024).
Temporal attention amplifies stimulus information in fronto-cingulate cortex at an intermediate processing stage. PNAS Nexus.
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Denison RN*, Tian, KJ*, Heeger, DJ, & Carrasco, M. (2024).
Anticipatory and evoked visual cortical dynamics of voluntary temporal attention. Nature Communications.
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