About

Rachel Denison is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Boston University. She is the Director of the Denison Lab, where her research focuses on understanding how the brain generates ongoing perceptual experience. Her lab studies visual perception, attention, and decision making, with a particular emphasis on temporal dynamics. The research integrates behavioral measurements such as psychophysics and eye tracking, neural measurements including fMRI and EEG/MEG, and computational modeling to explore these processes. Rachel Denison holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work aims to elucidate the neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying perception and cognition, contributing to a deeper understanding of how the brain processes complex perceptual information.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Cognitive psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Information Retrieval
• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Social psychology
• Statistics
• Cognitive science
• Engineering ethics
• Database

Selected publications

• Dynamic cortical routing mediates temporal attention

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2026-04-04

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Selecting information from dynamic streams requires mechanisms that prioritize a visual stimulus at a specific moment over preceding and subsequent stimuli at the same location. Whereas selective temporal attention has been found to enhance neural responses to stimuli, its impact on communication between brain regions remains unexplored. Here, we investigated whether prioritizing a stimulus at a specific time is achieved through selective routing of stimulus information across cortical networks using MEG. We developed a dynamic informational connectivity approach to quantify shared stimulus information between each region and the rest of the network. When stimuli compete in time, we found that temporal attention modulated the network at both early and late post-target time windows, routing information along two possible pathways-occipito-fronto-cingulate and occipito-temporal-via both transient bursts of network communication and theta-rhythmic replay. These results provide evidence that under dynamic sensory input, the timing of neural communication determines stimulus selection.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Clarifying the conceptual dimensions of representation in neuroscience

  Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026-03-20

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Using Artificial Neural Networks to Relate External Sensory Features to Internal Decisional Evidence

  Open Mind · 2026-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract All theories of perceptual decision-making postulate that external sensory information is transformed into the internal evidence that is used to judge the identity of the stimulus. However, the nature of this external-to-internal transformation is generally unknown. In two experiments, we examined how a particular stimulus feature—orientation—is transformed into internal evidence. Subjects judged whether Gabors were tilted clockwise or counterclockwise. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that increasing the stimulus tilt in fine-scale increments resulted in a linear increase in sensitivity. However, the results of Experiment 2 demonstrated that increasing the stimulus tilt in coarse-scale increments had little effect on sensitivity, suggesting a highly non-linear transformation. Critically, artificial neural networks (ANNs) trained on the orientation task reproduced the empirical results, providing a framework for examining this external-to-internal transformation. The ANNs’ internal activations revealed that fine-scale increments in tilt magnitude results in increasingly greater discriminability between the stimulus categories, but the degree of discriminability does not increase further after tilt magnitude becomes sufficiently large. Taken together, these results begin to reveal how external sensory information is transformed into the internal evidence that is used to judge the identity of a stimulus and suggest that ANNs could serve as a platform for understanding the mechanism underlying this critical transformation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Suboptimal but intact integration of Bayesian components during perceptual decision-making in autism

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-01-27

  other

  Bayesian perception in autism

  Publisher

• eLife Assessment: Movie reconstruction from mouse visual cortex activity

  2026-03-10

  peer-reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Voluntary temporal attention improves perception even in the absence of temporal competition

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2026-02-14 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  When successive stimuli occur close enough together in time, their perception can be impaired. Such impairments indicate temporal competition between successive stimuli for representational resources. Voluntary temporal attention can bias processing resources in favor of a behaviorally relevant moment, improving perception at the attended time at the expense of impairments at unattended times. However it is unclear whether these perceptual tradeoffs across time arise because voluntary temporal attention selects among actively competing stimulus representations, such as within visual working memory, or if instead, temporal attention facilitates stimulus processing prior to a competitive stage. Here we used a temporal cueing task with up to two targets in succession to test whether and how the effects of temporal attention depend on temporal competition. We found that voluntary temporal attention improved performance even in the absence of temporal competition, when only one stimulus appeared during the trial. Moreover, the magnitude of attentional enhancement was comparable with and without competition. These results suggest that voluntary temporal attention enhances perception by facilitating processing prior to a competitive stage, rather than by resolving conflicts between actively competing stimulus representations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Perceptual meta-uncertainty reveals enhanced calibration of sensory confidence in autism

  Open MIND · 2026-01-01

  otherOpen accessSenior author

  This registration contains all data and code needed to evaluate and reproduce the results in the paper "Perceptual meta-uncertainty reveals enhanced calibration of sensory confidence in autism".

  PublisherDOI

• Clarifying the conceptual dimensions of representation in neuroscience

  Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026-03-20 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The relative psychometric function: a general analysis framework for relating psychological processes

  Journal of Vision · 2025-07-15

  articleOpen access

  Psychophysics seeks to quantitatively characterize relationships between objective properties of the world and subjective properties of perception. However, traditional approaches investigate psychophysical dependencies of perception on stimulus properties on a case by case basis rather than seeking to identify quantitative relationships among these psychological processes themselves. This latter goal is particularly important when the processes in question likely depend on each other in some way, such as is the case for subjective experience and task performance: typically, stronger physical stimuli lead to better performance and stronger subjective experiences of clarity, vividness, or confidence. But is the relationship between performance and subjective experience fixed, or can it vary, e.g. by task or attentional demands? Such questions are key for better understanding psychological processes in general, and subjective experience in particular. Here, we develop and showcase a new psychophysical method designed to answer such questions: relative psychometric function (RPF) analysis, which characterizes the nonlinear psychometric relationships between psychological processes and how these relationships change under different circumstances (e.g. experimental manipulations). We demonstrate the advantages of RPF analysis using a sample dataset in which human subjects discriminated random dot kinematogram stimuli which varied in dot motion coherence and overall dot density (dots per visual degree), and rated confidence. RPF analysis revealed systematic changes in the relationship between performance and two subjective measures (confidence and metacognitive sensitivity) due to dot density and task design choices. While these empirical results are intriguing in their own right, they also show how RPF analysis can reveal changes in quantitative relationships between any two psychological measures: performance, vividness, clarity, reaction time, confidence, and more. To encourage the scientific community to use RPF analysis on their data, we also present our open-source RPF toolbox.

  PublisherDOI

• eLife Assessment: Movie reconstruction from mouse visual cortex activity

  2025-03-25

  peer-reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The ability to reconstruct imagery represented by the brain has the potential to give us an intuitive understanding of what the brain sees. Reconstruction of visual input from human fMRI data has garnered significant attention in recent years. Comparatively less focus has been directed towards vision reconstruction from single-cell recordings, despite its potential to provide a more direct measure of the information represented by the brain. Here, we achieve high-quality reconstructions of videos presented to mice, from the activity of neurons in their visual cortex. Using our method of video optimization via backpropagation through a state-of-the-art dynamic neural encoding model we reliably reconstruct 10-second movies at 30 Hz from two-photon calcium imaging data. We achieve a ≈ 2-fold increase in pixel-by-pixel correlation compared to previous state-of-the-art reconstructions of static images from mouse V1, while also capturing temporal dynamics. We find that critical for high-quality reconstructions are the number of neurons in the dataset and the use of model ensembling. This paves the way for movie reconstruction to be used as a tool to investigate a variety of visual processing phenomena.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Dynamics of Temporal Attention

  NIH · $116k · 2016–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Ned Block

  New York University

  110 shared

• Wei Ji

  New York University

  107 shared

• David L. Barack

  103 shared

• Edgar Y. Walker

  University of Washington

  102 shared

• Stephan Pohl

  102 shared

• Jennifer Lee

  Tufts University

  101 shared

• Marisa Carrasco

  New York University

  34 shared

• Karen Tian

  Boston University

  22 shared

Labs

• Denison LabPI

Education

• Ph.D.

  U.C. Berkeley