G’day!

I am a Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Adelaide, running the Perception, Attention, Learning, and Memory Lab. The PALM Lab is a cognitive neuroscience and psychology lab researching visual attention and working memory – in a nutshell, trying to understand how we encode and maintain visual information for ongoing perception and cognition. For example, we study how learning and experience changes how visual information is represented in memory, using those insights to uncover the nature of capacity limits in working memory. Lately, I have been interested in promoting theory development in our field, creating a “theory map” to integrate and contrast current models. I served the field in the past by organizing the Working Memory Symposium, a virtual conference that connects the wider field and gives a platform for early-career researchers to speak about their research.

I am passionate about improving science, particularly by empowering early-career researchers to pursue reproducible and open research practices. I serve on the steering committee of ReproducibiliTea, a grassroots initiative to start Open Science communities at local institutions. I recently became the Open Practices Editor of Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, where I evaluate the open research materials in an attempt to enhance the computational reproducibility of the published manuscripts. I was recognized as a “rigor champion” by the NIH NINDS for my advocacy in this space.

A talk summarising some of my recent research and ideas:

I grew up in Sydney, Australia, where I completed my PhD, at the University of Sydney under the supervision of Alex Holcombe and Patrick Goodbourn. Following that, I completed my postdoc with Edward Awh and Edward Vogel in the Awh/Vogel Lab at the University of Chicago. I’m also a 7-time marathon finisher, espresso coffee enthusiast, and I spent 65,023 minutes listening on Spotify last year.

On this website, you will find my preprints, conference posters, talk slides and blog posts. The best way to keep up-to-date on what I am doing is via my Twitter (@will_ngiam), and feel free to email me at william(dot)ngiam(at)adelaide(dot)edu(dot)au..

ReproducibiliTea Podcast

I am one of the hosts of the ReproducibiliTea Podcast, where we try to highlight early-career researcher perspectives on the open scholarship movement.

YouTube

I try to upload summary videos of my research to my YouTube channel: