Ivette Colón

Dr. Ivette Colón

𖦹Postdoc fellow at McGill𖦹

email scholar bluesky cv → 
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me n my interests

My most recent line of work aims to characterize how individuals organize semantic content in their behavior and in the brain. Current projects include measuring mental concept structure for all sorts of things (faces, places, objects, words, social roles, haptic textures) and applying semantic similarity spaces to neural decoding in fMRI.

Throughout my research, I’ve been exploring how our representations of semantic content accommodate the many kinds of (embodied, abstract, ephemeral, instinctual) information associated with a concept. What are the mathematical principles behind how this is accomplished in the brain and its models?

I recently completed my PhD with Tim Rogers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before that, I was a research specialist in Alice O’Toole’s Face Perception Lab at UT Dallas.

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the other work

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

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publications

journal articles

  1. Colón, Y. I., Mukherjee, K., Postle, B., Rogers, T. T. Neural representations of faces are distributed and highly-individualized. in prep. poster →
  2. Wohltjen, S., Colón, Y. I., Zhu, Z., Miller, K., Huang, W. C., Mutlu, B., Niedenthal, P. M. Uniting theory and data: the promise and challenge of creating an honest model of facial expression. Cognition and Emotion, 2024 paper →
  3. Noyes, E., Parde, C. J., Colón, Y. I., Hill, M. Q., Castillo, C. D., Jenkins, R., O’Toole, A. J. Seeing through disguise: Getting to know you with a deep convolutional neural network. Cognition, 2021 paper →
  4. Parde, C. J., Colón, Y. I., Hill, M. Q., Castillo, C. D., Dhar, P., O’Toole, A. J. Single unit status in deep convolutional neural network codes for face identification: sparseness redefined. Journal of Vision, 2021 paper →
  5. Colón, Y. I., Castillo, C. D., O’Toole, A. J. Facial expression is retained in deep networks trained for face identification. Journal of Vision, 2021 paper →
  6. Hill, M. Q., Parde, C. J., Castillo, C. D., Colón, Y. I., Ranjan, R., Chen, J. C., Blanz, V., O’Toole, A. J. Deep convolutional neural networks in the face of caricature. Nature Machine Intelligence, 2019 paper →

conference papers & proceedings

  1. Colón, Y. I., Rogers, T. T. Finding motifs in mental representations of faces, places, and objects. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society, 2025 ★ graduate student award paper →
  2. Li, Z., Colón, Y. I., Mukherjee, K., Rogers, T. T. Iterated LASSO reveals highly distributed and variable representations of faces, places, and objects. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society, 2025 paper →
  3. Colón, Y. I., Rogers, T. T., Lambon Ralph, M., Rouse, M. Semantic distance organizes social knowledge: Insights from semantic dementia and cross-modal conceptual space. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society, 2024 paper →
  4. Parde, C. J., Castillo, C., Hill, M. Q., Colón, Y. I., Sankaranarayanan, S., Chen, J.-C., O’Toole, A. J. Face and image representation in deep CNN features. IEEE Int. Conf. on Automatic Face & Gesture Recognition, 2017