2025 goals/plans

We finally have the sanction letter for a 2 year grant that will support 2 PhD students. It will also help us get some very minor equipment to implement a very applied project in collaboration with a startup and 3 other universities. It is a good start but we still need to fund some of our exciting basic science work. 

On that note, I recently heard a rumor that a cogsci-specific grant (the only one of its kind in India as far as I know) received 12000 applications this year. I sure hope that's just a rumor that isn't true because that was one of the few grants that people in my field could count on. I've had other grants rejected for very strange reasons that suggested that they were not sending them to appropriate reviewers who understood cogsci but this one always gets sent to experts in the field within the country. This time, I suspect that people from other departments applied given that the lines between cogsci and AI have blurred some more in the recent past and everyone thinks that their work applies to cogsci (and they may have a point).

With ANRF and other initiatives, it looks like the govt is trying, so I remain optimistic that the funding situation in the country improves. Our department also won a govt infrastructure grant that will get us a 128 channel EEG system and a 32 channel wireless EEG system. This grant is a huge deal for us given that we are a private institute with limited resources. My colleagues from institutes with govt funding find it easier to buy such equipment but this really is a lifeline that we needed and so we are thankful that there are govt funding mechanisms that allow people like us to get somewhat expensive equipment (typically not possible to fund through individual grants to PIs and labs) to build our capacity for neuroscience research. I just need to find some more money to pay for the studies we proposed in that grant.  

It's going to be interesting times trying to fund our basic science work but in the meantime, we march forward. We have some limited internal funds that will pay for a few studies, so we'll keep going for a year or so. We also have very supportive collaborators who have offered to pay for some studies at least initially. That will allow us to generate more pilot data for future grant applications together with these collaborators. 

We are currently pursuing a few different lines of research in the lab, namely, Theme 1: Memorability; Theme 2: Computational neuroscience of memory; Theme 3: Emotion and memory, and other misc work.

Theme 1: We expect to publish a few substantive journal articles this year. Prajneya Kumar had a paper accepted to WACV 2025 together with Eshika from CVIT (collaboration with Dr. Makarand Tapaswi's lab) and is working on an exciting second paper on English and Hindi word memorability for which he has completed data collection from 740 participants. We expect to submit this paper (inspired by findings by Dr. Weizhen Xie and Dr. Wilma Bainbridge, who are also collaborators on this work) for publication in Feb/Mar 2025. Anuska Maity, an MS by research student in the lab, is finalizing another journal article for submission on a related topic of how memorability depends exactly how a word is used even within the same cued-recall memory task. Yash Agarwal and Prayush Rathore, dual degree computational linguistics students in the lab, are putting the finishing touches on a paper detailing how memorability measures critically depend on how you test memory. Taken together, these papers challenge the existing notion that memorability is an intrinsic property of a concept that survives averaging over extrinsic factors like culture, language, experimental context, etc. I have half a mind to acknowledge the funding agencies that refused to fund this work when we eventually publish these papers. I'm quite pleased that we managed to get these papers done with very limited resources and zero external funding.  

Theme 2: We have been working with neural data to uncover some fundamental mechanisms of memory retrieval. In a paper to be submitted to non-archival conference, Atharva Joshi, another dual degree student in the lab, describes some behavioral evidence for temporal context retrieval even when the task does not demand it. Ozoswita, a PhD scholar in the lab, has started analyzing some fMRI data to support this claim. Aruneek Biswas, an RA in the lab, has been analyzing some LFP data to describe spatiotemporal patterns of neural activity in the human brain that have not been described properly before. Pooja, a PhD scholar, has started piloting some studies on event segmentation and plans to combine EEG with them soon. Gargi, another PhD scholar, has been looking at EEG datasets to further probe the phenomenon of memorability from a neural perspective while also looking into some more ambitious questions (described later). 

Theme 3: Pritha Ghosh, an MS by research student in the lab, is working on a couple of projects on emotion and memory in collaboration with Aruneek and Pooja. One of these projects is something that I initially developed together with Dr. David Huron while I was still a graduate student. This idea is based on some theories in ethology but Pritha and Aruneek have significantly improved the logic of the project. The other project is one where we try to unify the field of emotion perception and event cognition using an idea that goes back to Kahneman. We have submitted a grant application to do this work (I sure hope that the 12k rumor is untrue or that it doesn't affect the outcome because we are all pretty upbeat about these ideas). Pritha herself won an IIITH ihub MS fellowship for proposing to do this work on emotion and memory. Amal Sunny, a dual degree student, is investigating LLM-based measures of narrative flow, applying them to larger narrative datasets. So under theme 3, we have some eclectic projects and people try ideas that are currently not necessarily the focus of the lab but ones that have the potential to push us in new and important directions. 

So this year, I expect that we will submit some papers under themes 2 and 3 as well or at the very least complete data collection for some of them. While we continue to develop more lines of research on memorability (theme 1), there is a growing feeling in the lab that we are not pursuing big and ambitious enough questions on memory. Part of this is of lack of resources. Asking big questions sometimes is an expensive endeavor that requires long-term external funding for basic science. However, that is not all there is to it. Sometimes, there is also lack of confidence, or a fear of pursuing big questions because failure rates are higher, students need papers to graduate and move on, etc. I had an open discussion about this in the lab. Our PhD scholars have started thinking about bigger questions about memory and consciousness, memory and sense-of-agency, etc as they have somewhat longer timelines and can pursue "riskier" and more ambitious lines of work. I have urged the lab to take journal clubs way more seriously than it has in the past. We plan to read slightly outside the topics we work on in the lab in the hopes that it inspires fresh and important questions that we can pursue. With the EEG infrastructure to be set up soon, it makes sense to start thinking about such ambitious and bigger ideas. We have also started thinking about some very novel ideas with neuromodulation in collaboration with Dr. Neeraj Kumar at IITH. So if someone who has any sway at any of our funding agencies is reading this, please fund this work, we'll be sending some grant applications your way soon! :)