Personnel » Patryk Laurent

Patryk Laurent

I am a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and affiliated with the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition.

Research Interests

I am particularly interested in developing and studying highly biological, yet minimalist, models of brain regions involved in memory and in language. I think that through modelling cognitive and functional systems, one is forced to be extremely precise about hypotheses, and these hypotheses can be tested in the biological predictions they make.

Current Research

In this rotation I am working with Jeff and Sara on a project involving the Visual Word Form Area. We are testing the area to determine whether the region is sensitive to orthography of words (which we are taking to be extremes of bigram frequencies).

Academic Profile

My undergraduate work was at the University of Virginia at the Levy Lab in the Department of Neurosurgery where we simulated hippocampal CA3 in a neural network at sizes in excess of 10,000 neurons. In this model, each neuron was randomly connected to a small percentage of the others, and synaptic strength was governed by LTP and LTD, associating over a time window. My research focused on varying the time window, and I found that maximum neuron shifting occured when the stimulus duration and time window were matched at an e-fold rate.

A conference paper describing the results can be found here.

Work Profile

I have worked for 7 years as a computer programmer and developer in various languages, such as C, Perl, PHP, and my favorite to date, Java. During those seven years I worked at several different companies, including:

For details on what I did at each of these companies, please visit my homepage.

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