Jens Madsen

• Doctor of Philosophy
• City College

Complex systems, such as in brains, markets, and societies, exhibit internal dynamics influenced by external factors. Disentangling delayed external effects from internal dynamics within these systems is often difficult. We propose using a Vector Autoregressive model with eXogenous input (VARX) to capture delayed interactions between internal and e...

Students often search for answers online, and gravitate to short explanation videos, which are abundant online. While they seem useful and can be quite engaging, it is unclear if these videos benefit classroom learning. We hypothesized that when carefully matched to the class instruction, video can be helpful, but that benefits will depend on the a...

Students often drift in and out of focus during class. Effective teachers recognize this and re-engage them when necessary. With the shift to remote learning, teachers have lost the visual feedback needed to adapt to varying student engagement. We propose using readily available front-facing video to infer attention levels based on movements of the...

Students often search for answers online, and gravitate to short explanation videos, which are abundant online. While they seem useful and can be quite engaging, it is unclear if these videos benefit classroom learning. We hypothesized that when carefully matched to the class instruction, video can be helpful, but that benefits will depend on the a...

In this work, we present a dataset that combines functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to use as a resource for understanding human brain function in these two imaging modalities. The dataset can also be used for optimizing preprocessing methods for simultaneously collected imaging data. The dataset includes simultaneo...

It is often said that the body and the mind are connected. Yet, direct evidence of a bidirectional link is elusive. We hypothesized a top-down effect of cognition on arousal, and predicted that auditory narratives will drive not only brain signals but also peripheral physiological signals. We find that auditory narratives entrained gaze variation,...

In this work we present a dataset that combines functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to use as a resource for the understanding of human brain function. The dataset can also be used for optimizing preprocessing methods for simultaneously collected imaging data. The dataset includes simultaneously collected recordings...

Neural, physiological and behavioral signals synchronize between human subjects in a variety of settings. Multiple hypotheses have been proposed to explain this interpersonal synchrony, but there is no clarity under which conditions it arises, for which signals, or whether there is a common underlying mechanism. We hypothesized that similar cogniti...

Neural, physiological and behavioral signals synchronize between human subjects in a variety of settings. Multiple hypotheses have been proposed to explain this interpersonal synchrony, but there is no clarity under which conditions it arises, for which signals, or whether there is a common underlying mechanism. We hypothesized that similar cogniti...

Heart rate has natural fluctuations that are typically ascribed to autonomic function. Recent evidence suggests that conscious processing can affect the timing of the heartbeat. We hypothesized that heart rate is modulated by conscious processing and therefore dependent on attentional focus. To test this, we leverage the observation that neural pro...

Significance Education is increasingly delivered online, but are students actually paying attention? Here we demonstrate that efficacy of video instruction can be assessed remotely with standard web cameras. Specifically, we show that attentive students have similar eye movements when watching instructional videos and that synchronization of eye mo...

Sleep problems are highly prevalent in elderly persons with dementia. Poor sleep constitute a major problem as it causes distress and may aggravate the dementia symptoms. Music has been proposed as a potential sleep aid, and in this study, we assessed the feasibility and effect of bedtime music listening for improving sleep problems in older adults...

Heart rate has natural fluctuations that are typically ascribed to autonomic function. Recent evidence suggests that conscious processing can affect the timing of the heartbeat. We hypothesized that heart rate is modulated by conscious processing and therefore dependent on attentional focus. To test this we leverage the observation that neural proc...

A variety of psychiatric, behavioral and cognitive phenotypes have been linked to brain ‘’functional connectivity’’ -- the pattern of correlation observed between different brain regions. Most commonly assessed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), here, we investigate the connectivity-phenotype associations with functional connectivi...

Experienced teachers pay close attention to their students, adjusting their teaching when students seem lost. This dynamic interaction is missing in online education. We propose to measure attention to online videos remotely by tracking eye movements, as we hypothesize that attentive students follow videos similarly with their eyes. Here we show th...

Music tends to be highly repetitive, both in terms of musical structure and in terms of listening behavior, yet little is known about how engagement changes with repeated exposure. Here we postulate that engagement with music affects the inter-subject correlation of brain responses during listening. We predict that repeated exposure to music will a...

Online educational materials are largely disseminated through videos, and yet there is little understanding of how these videos engage students and fuel academic success. We hypothesized that components of the electroencephalogram (EEG), previously shown to reflect video engagement, would be predictive of academic performance in the context of educ...

Online educational materials are largely disseminated through videos, and yet there is little understanding of how these videos engage students and fuel academic success. We hypothesized that components of the electroencephalogram (EEG), previously shown to reflect video engagement, would be predictive of academic performance in the context of educ...

Knowledge of patients affective state could prove to be crucial for health-care professionals in both diagnosis and treatment, however, this requires patients to report how they feel. In practice the sampling rate of affective states needs to be kept low, in order to ensure that the patients can rest. Furthermore using traditional methods of measur...

We introduce a two-alternative forced-choice experimental paradigm to quantify expressed emotions in music using the two well-known arousal and valence (AV) dimensions. In order to produce AV scores from the pairwise comparisons and to visualize the locations of excerpts in the AV space, we introduce a flexible Gaussian process (GP) framework which...

We introduce five regression models for the modeling of expressed emotion in music using data obtained in a two alternative forced choice listening experiment. The pre-dictive performance of the proposed models is compared using learning curves, showing that all models converge to produce a similar classification error. The predictive rank-ing of t...