Thomas Sprague

Thomas Sprague is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and a member of the UCSB Neuroscience program. He holds a BA in Cognitive Sciences from Rice University (2010) and a PhD in Neurosciences from UC San Diego (2016). His research focuses on understanding how neural systems encode and manipulate information to support goal-directed behavior, leveraging computational neuroimaging (fMRI, EEG) and model-based analysis techniques.

Key research interests include visual cognition, working memory, attention, and the neural mechanisms underlying prioritization in dynamic behavioral contexts. His lab, the Perception, Cognition, and Action Lab (PCA Lab), investigates how task goals modulate neural representations of visual information across brain regions. He has received prestigious awards such as the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and NIH grants.

Dr. Sprague’s work is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, Army Research Labs, and NVIDIA. He emphasizes open science practices, making data and code publicly available through his lab website and GitHub profile. His contributions include developing methods for multivariate analysis and inverted encoding models to decode neural representations of visual features and behavioral relevance.