Ivette Colón

Ivette Colón

PhD Candidate @ UW–Madison

)cognitive neuroscientist(

fixin' to complete my PhD
with Dr. Tim Rogers at UW!

email scholar bluesky cv →


I am also affiliated with:

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research

social perception & knowledge organization

How is social knowledge structured in our minds and brains? How are we able to reliably read others' social signals, and when does that fail? How might individuals differ in their ability to interpret these signals or organize their knowledge of what they mean?

mental & neural motifs

Another line of my work aims to characterize shared and idiosynratic patterns in how people organize visuosocial and semantic content in behavior and the brain. My current focus is applying behaviorally-derived semantic similarity spaces to neural decoding in fMRI.

representations of content

Throughout my rearch, I've been exploring how our representations of semantic content accommodate the many kinds of information associated with a concept. What are the mathematical principles behind how this is accomplished in the brain and its models?

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publications

journal articles

  1. Neural representations of faces are distributed and highly-individualized.

    Colón, Y. I., Mukherjee, K., Postle, B., Rogers, T. T.

    in prep. · Cognitive Neuroscience Society 2026 poster →

  2. Uniting theory and data: the promise and challenge of creating an honest model of facial expression.

    Wohltjen, S., Colón, Y. I., Zhu, Z., Miller, K., Huang, W. C., Mutlu, B., Niedenthal, P. M.

    Cognition and Emotion, 2024 Read the paper→

  3. Seeing through disguise: Getting to know you with a deep convolutional neural network.

    Noyes, E., Parde, C. J., Colón, Y. I., Hill, M. Q., Castillo, C. D., Jenkins, R., O’Toole, A. J.

    Cognition, 2021 Read the paper→

  4. Single unit status in deep convolutional neural network codes for face identification: sparseness redefined.

    Parde, C. J., Colón, Y. I., Hill, M. Q., Castillo, C. D., Dhar, P., O’Toole, A. J.

    Journal of Vision, 2021 Read the paper→

  5. Facial expression is retained in deep networks trained for face identification.

    Colón, Y. I., Castillo, C. D., O’Toole, A. J.

    Journal of Vision, 2021 Read the paper→

  6. Deep convolutional neural networks in the face of caricature.

    Hill, M. Q., Parde, C. J., Castillo, C. D., Colón, Y. I., Ranjan, R., Chen, J. C., Blanz, V., O’Toole, A. J.

    Nature Machine Intelligence, 2019 Read the paper→

conference papers & proceedings

  1. Finding motifs in mental representations of faces, places, and objects. ★ graduate student award

    Colón, Y. I., Rogers, T. T.

    Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society · 2025 Read the paper →

  2. Iterated LASSO reveals highly distributed and variable representations of faces, places, and objects.

    Li, Z., Colón, Y. I., Mukherjee, K., Rogers, T. T.

    Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society · 2025 Read the paper →

  3. Semantic distance organizes social knowledge: Insights from semantic dementia and cross-modal conceptual space.

    Colón, Y. I., Rogers, T. T., Lambon Ralph, M., Rouse, M.

    Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society · 2024 Read the paper →

  4. Face and image representation in deep CNN features.

    Parde, C. J., Castillo, C., Hill, M. Q., Colón, Y. I., Sankaranarayanan, S., Chen, J.-C., O’Toole, A. J.

    IEEE Int. Conf. on Automatic Face & Gesture Recognition · 2017

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beyond the lab

the other work

I’m a multimedia artist, musician, and DIY music organizer. Actively performing as footleg~

queery

I produced and hosted Queery, a LGBTQ+ talk show on WORT 89.9 FM.

wortfm.org →>