Aleksander W. Nitka

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the the Consciousness Lab, Institute of Psychology, at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. My main focus is to manage, quality control and analyse behavioural and neuroimaging data collected for the large-scale research project aiming to investigate the early and late neural correlates of consciousness.

In 2021, I have completed my PhD in experimental psychology as a part of the behavioural neuroscience group at the University of Nottingham where I was supervised by Jasper Robinson and Ed Wilding and worked on associative learning approach to human recognition memory. My research was funded by the BBSRC Doctoral Training Partnership.

During the course of my doctoral training, I have visited the lab of Nancy Carlisle (Carlisle Attention and Memory Lab, Lehigh University) where we investigated an interplay between working memory and attention. Prior to that, I worked as an RA at the Centre for Systems Neuroscience (University of Leicester), where, together with Joaquín Navajas we focused on visual attention and awareness.

Working with data is my passion. In 2021 I have earned a postgraduate diploma in Data Science from the AGH University of Technology in Krakow, Poland.

selected publications

An associative analysis of recognition memory: Relative recency effects in an eye-tracking paradigm.

Aleksander Nitka, Charlotte Bonardi, and Jasper Robinson

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition 2020

Abs Bib

We report 2 eye-tracking experiments with human variants of 2 rodent recognition memory tasks, relative recency and object-in-place. In Experiment 1 participants were sequentially exposed to 2 images, A then B, presented on a computer display. When subsequently tested with both images, participants biased looking toward the first-presented image A: the relative recency effect. When contextual stimuli x and y, respectively, accompanied A and B in the exposure phase (xA, yB), the recency effect was greater when y was present at test, than when x was present. In Experiment 2 participants viewed 2 identical presentations of a 4-image array, ABCD, followed by a test with the same array, but in which one of the pairs of stimuli exchanged position (BACD or ABDC). Participants looked preferentially at the displaced stimulus pair: the object-in-place effect. Three further conditions replicated Experiment 1’s findings: 2 pairs of images were presented one after the other (AB followed by CD); on a test with AB and CD, relative recency was again evident as preferential looking at AB. Moreover, this effect was greater when the positions of the first-presented A and B were exchanged between exposure and test (BACD), compared with when the positions of second-presented C and D were exchanged (ABDC). The results were interpreted within the theoretical framework of the Sometime Opponent Process model of associative learning (Wagner, 1981).
@article{nitka2020associative, title = {An associative analysis of recognition memory: Relative recency effects in an eye-tracking paradigm.}, author = {Nitka, Aleksander and Bonardi, Charlotte and Robinson, Jasper}, journal = {Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition}, doi = {10.1037/xan0000258}, volume = {46}, number = {3}, pages = {314}, year = {2020}, publisher = {American Psychological Association}, }