As 2022 draws to a close, I was inspired by all other 2022 wrap ups I’ve been seeing—like Spotify’s wrapped, Strava, Apple music—and so I decided to write a Minda Lab 2022 Wrap Up. We had a fantastic and productive year. Everyone in the lab (undergraduates, MSc / PhD students, postdocs, and me) has things that we’ve accomplished and can be proud of. Let’s take a look!

2022-2023 lab photo (left) and the 2021-2022 (right) lab photo

Major milestones in 2022

This was a big category, with many students defending, completing, graduating, and beginning new things. If you want to read a thesis or dissertation, just follow the link.

• Ana Ruiz Pardo defended her PhD https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/8482/ 
• Toka Zhu defended her PhD (and got married) https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/8659/
• Neha Khemani defended her MSc https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/8758/
• Anthony Cruz defended his MSc https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/8718/
• Madeline Slack defended her MSc https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/8904/ 
• Chelsea McKenzie completed her honours thesis at Brescia College in the spring and began her MSc in the lab. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/undergradawards_2022/6/
• Carson Rumble-Tricker, Rebeca Tejada, Abbey Horner, Malak Sadek, and Madeline Bloomberg all completed honours theses and Meaghan Mosier Farquharson completed an independent study.
• Evan Cross, Shelby Laing, Urooj Anees began their honours thesis this year and Raha Nemati began working on an independent study.
• I took a position as Associate Director of the new Western Institute for Neuroscience, and I resumed my tradition of being one of the Orators at June commencement, reading out the names of graduates.

Research in 2022

We published the following papers in 2022:

• Ruiz Pardo, A. C., & Minda, J. P. (2022). Reexamining the “Brain Drain” Effect: Does Ward et al. (2022) Replicate? Acta Psychologica, 230, 103717. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103717
• Pavlović, T., Azevedo, F., De, K., RiañoMoreno, J. C., Minda, J. P., … Van Bavel, J. J. (2022). Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning. PNAS Nexus, 1(3), gac093. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac093
• Qiu, T. T. & Minda, J. P. (2022). Psychedelic experiences and mindfulness are associated with improved wellbeing, The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, https://doi.org/10.1080/02791072.2022.2060773
• Van Bavel, J.J., Cichocka, A., Capraro, V. Minda, J. P., et al. (2022) National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic. Nature Communications 13, 517. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27668-9
• Azevedo, F., Pavlović, T., Rêgo, G. G. d., Ay, F. C., Gjoneska, B., Etienne, T., Minda, J. P., … Sampaio, W. M. (2022). Social and moral psychology of COVID-19 across 69 countries. Nature Scientific Data, in press https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/a3562

Priya Kalra (postdoc) published the following:

• Kalra, P. B., & Richland, L. E. (2022). Relational Reasoning: A Foundation for Higher Cognition Based on Abstraction. Mind, Brain and Education: The Official Journal of the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/mbe.12323

A paper from Julia Ignaszewski’s time as an undergraduate was published this year:

• Smith, D., Wolff, A., Wolman, A., Ignaszewski, J., & Northoff, G. (2022). Temporal continuity of self: Long autocorrelation windows mediate self-specificity. NeuroImage, 119305. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119305

And a second publication of my book!

My book “How To Think: Understanding the Way We Decide, Remember and Make Sense of the World” which had been published in the UK in 2021 was published in North America in 2022 and started appearing in bookstores and libraries everywhere (still time to order for xmas!)

Conferences

Minda lab members presented at several conferences in 2022 (Toronto, Halifax, Boston). In fact, think this year was the first time we had been to conferences in person since 2019!

• Kalra, P. B. (2022). Perceptual Similarity Affects Relational Judgements. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 44(44). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4n379013
• Khemani, N., Ruiz Pardo, A. C, & Minda, J. P (2022). Culture and Category Learning: The Relationship between Analytic and Holistic Thinking Styles. Poster presented at the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Toronto, ON. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4gj3h4wk
• Cruz, A. & Minda, J. P (2022) Sorry, I Can’t Talk Right Now: Category Learning on the Go. Talk presented at the 63rd. Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston, MA.
• Kalra, P. & Minda, J. P (2022) Implicitly Learned Information Affects Explicitly Learned Category Judgements. Talk presented at the 63rd. Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston, MA.
• Minda, J. P. (July 2022). Six Different Ways to Carve Nature at its Joints, Talk presented at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Sciences, Halifax, NS.

In addition, we have some exciting new research that has progressed significantly in 2022.

• Bailey Brashears is moving ahead with our investigation into cognitive psychology in Minecraft.
• Julia Ignaszewski is looking at mood induction with virtual reality.
• Tim Qiu has just shown us some exciting new data with fNIRS and category learning.

Awards

Some of our member’s have won awards to be rightly proud of.

• Chelsea McKenzie’s Honours thesis was highly commended at the International Undergraduate Awards! Great work, Chelsea
• Madeline Bloomberg was awarded the R.B. Liddy Gold Medal award in Social Science. Well done Madeline!

Other fun things

There were a few other things going on too:

• I was on The Amazing Race Canada! (thanks to Minda lab Alum Emily Nielsen for help here also). I was part of one the challenges when the Racer’s came through London and Western university. Read more here: https://news.westernu.ca/2022/08/the-amazing-race-canada-western-university/

Or check out the video below:

• Several Minda Lab members (Priya, Ana, Chelsea) along with their partners and another lab on campus participated in the FoamFest 5k as the “Big Brain Energy” team. This was organized by Priya and the team had a great time at Boler Mountain!

• Julia organized the Brain and Mind Art Social which has now become a regular event with students and trainees from many of the labs in the cognitive neuroscience group participating.

So that’s a wrap. I may have forgotten something (lord knows I forget more things in a day than I can even remember) but I wanted to give you all a huge shoutout for another year of great work, great science, and great times!