^ My brain
Everybody who has participated in my neuroimaging research has been given a copy of their own 3D brain images.
Working with students in research
My interests in mentoring students in research are closely aligned with my interests in teaching. Since serving as Assistant Director of Advising at the University of Delaware, I've worked with numerous students who were interested in pursuing research. For those undergraduate students in our lab that I mentor more closely, I find myself guided primarily by my teaching philosophy. My top priorities include making research accessible and approachable to anyone who is interested, constantly working toward a lab environment where people from all backgrounds and experiences feel welcome, and focusing on providing positive feedback and praise for student success wherever possible.
My research interests
I am currently using fMRI to examine the neural and behavioral signatures of visual statistical learning - a type of learning that allows us to incidentally extract regularities from a visual environment. On a day-to-day basis, we navigate and make sense of our visual world in a way that seems effortless- despite the overwhelming amount of stimuli we are faced with at any given timepoints. Without explicitly trying to do so, how do we extract and remember stimuli we encounter, how do we extract meaningful associations between those stimuli, and how do our goals or prior knowledge impact this ability? My current work examines some of these questions by examining the role of category knowledge of stimuli and the role visual properties intrinsically imbued within stimuli. Some of my ongoing fMRI-focused work is supported my previously published behavioral work. Specifically, I have found that a person's goals and knowledge about the world can influence influence what may or may not be statistically learned. This engenders additional questions about how we may extract statistical information from real-world contexts.
Many of my prior research interests have also been driven by the impact of reward on learning and behavior. Most recently in a project led by my friend and colleague Su Hyoun Park, neural and behavioral evidence has revealed a role of reward on visual statistical learning. This finding, in combination with stimulus-driven and task-driven influences I am currently investigating, motivates a great deal of future work to be explored.