Bio

Clíona is a postdoc with Cameron Ellis’ Scaffolding of Cognition Team and Dan Yamin’s NeuroAILab. She earned her PhD from Trinity College Dublin, where she worked on developing cognitive computational methods for infant neuroimaging with Prof. Rhodri Cusack. Her bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience was also completed at Trinity College Dublin. Clíona is interested in how human infants learn to be so intelligent with such efficiency, how this can be modelled using the latest advances in AI, and how these methods can inform our understanding of the developing mind.

Professional Education

  • Doctor of Philosophy, Trinity College (2025)
  • Bachelor of Arts, Trinity College (2019)
  • PhD, Trinity College Dublin, Psychology (2025)
  • B.A. (Mod.), Trinity College Dubin, Neuroscience (2019)

Stanford Advisors

Contact

  • Academic
    clionaod@stanford.edu
    University - Scholar Department: Psychology Position: Postdoctoral Scholar

Additional Info

All Publications

  • Infants have rich visual categories in ventrotemporal cortex at 2months of age. Nature neuroscience O'Doherty, C., Dineen, A. T., Truzzi, A., King, G., Zaadnoordijk, L., Harrison, K., D'Arcy, E., White, J., Caldinelli, C., Holloway, T., Kravchenko, A., Diedrichsen, J., Tarrant, A., Byrne, A. T., Foran, A., Molloy, E. J., Cusack, R. 2026

    Abstract

    What are the foundations of visual categories in the human brain? Although infant looking behavior characterizes the development of overt categorization, it cannot measure neural representation or distinguish the underlying mechanism. For this, we need rich neuroimaging from young infants and the capacity to apply advanced computational models of vision. In this study, we conducted an awake functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of more than 100 2-month-old infants, with follow-ups at 9months, finding that categorical structure is present in high-level visual cortex from 2months of age. This precedes its emergence in lateral visual cortex, suggesting non-hierarchical development of category representations. A deep neural network model aligned with infants' representational geometry, indicating that the features comprising infants' category template span a range of complexities and can be learned from the statistics of visual input. Our results reveal the existence of complex function in ventral visual cortex at 2months of age and describe the early development of category perception.

    View details for DOI 10.1038/s41593-025-02187-8

    View details for PubMedID 41629539

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3450-1199