Recent Dissertations

Below are recent dissertations that show students in our graduate program working on the cutting edge in their respective fields.

2024-2025

Robust and Generalizable Representations in the Hippocampus
Hung-Tu Chen

Gaze in Context: Individual and Group Differences in Real-World Visual Attention
Amanda Haskins

Psychophysical and Pharmacological Models of Visual Hallucination
Nathan Heller

Behavioral and Neural Evidence for Perceptual Inference of Position
Sharif Saleki

2023-2024

Integrating Higher-Order Cognition With Sensory Experience: Insights From Cue-Based Expectations Across Diverse Domains
Heejung Jung

Target Selection and Enhancement During Attentional Tracking
Marvin Maechler

2022-2023

Mapping the Malleable Self: How Self-Views are Represented and Learned Within the Social Brain
Sasha Brietzke

Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms of Serotonin Modulation of Impulsivity and Reward
Stephanie Desrochers

Epistemic Mentalizing and Causal Cognition Across Agents and Objects
Bryan Gonzalez

What Makes Conversation Good? How Responsivity, Topics, and Insider Language Predict Feelings of Connection
Emma Templeton

2021-2022

Assessing the Balance Between Flexible and Rigid Behaviors and their Neural Bases
Kenneth Amaya

Encoding Dynamic Information in the Face Responsive Cortex
Vassiki Chauhan

Objective Social Connection and its Dynamic Relation to Mental Health in College Students
Alexander Dasilva

Spatial Representation in Postrhinal Cortex
Patrick LaChance

Modeling the Fast-Timescale Network Dynamics that Underlie Complex Thought
Lucy Owen

Beyond Homogenous Decision-Making Models: Role of Brain Areas Interaction and Heterogeneity
Mohsen Rakhshan

Effects of Volatility on Prefrontal Neural Dynamics and Possible Underlying Neural Mechanisms
Mehran Moradi Spitmaan

Examining Coupled Attention from Individual Differences to Dynamic Interactions
Sophie Wohltjen

Attending and Remembering the External World
Kirsten Ziman

2020-2021

Deductive Reasoning: The Structure of Mental Models and Reasoning in Everyday Life
Katherine Alfred

Building Relationships Through Dynamic Interactions
Jin Hyun Cheong

Dynamic Coding of Motivationally-Relevant Information in the Rodent Nucleus Accumbens
Jimmie Gmaz

Characterizing Sharp-Wave Ripple Content in Response to Novel Behaviorally-Relevant Shortcuts
Emily Irvine

Behavioral and Neural Contributions to Cue-Driven Motivation
Elizabeth Smedley

2019-2020

Formal Principles of Feature Relations in Perception
Elijah Bowen

Contributions of the Postrhinal Cortex to Contextual Retrieval of Auditory Fear Conditioning
Nicole DeAngeli

Understanding the Neural Basis of Adaptive Value-Based Learning
Shiva Ghaanifarashahi 

Representation of Sketch Drawings in Object-Selective Visual Cortex
Kevin Hartstein

Social Cognitive Maps: A Relational Account of Person Representation and Memory
Eshin Jolly

The Construction of Perceived Location for Moving Objects
Sirui Liu

Individual Differences in Fine-Grained Cortical Functional Architecture: Correlations with Traits and States
Feilong Ma

The Neural Representation of Indoor Spaces
Liwei Sun

2018-2019

Origin and Functional Relevance of Oscillations in the Rat Ventral Striatum
James Eric Carmichael

Social Closeness Modulates the Neural Representation and Perception of the Self and Others
Andrea Courtney

The Role of Phasic Activity in the Dorsolateral Striatum in Regulating Action Vigor and Habits
Adam Crego

The Influence of Retrieval Practice on Casual Learning
Luke Eglington

fMRI Investigations of Category-Selective Visual Cortex in Developmental Prosopagnosia
Jiahui Guo

Crossmodal Representation of Emotion
Beau Sievers

Characterizing Feature Representations in the Human Face-Processing Network with Multivariate Analyses and Encoding Models
Matteo Visconti Castello di Oleggio

2017-2018

Investigating How Conscious Experience Shapes the Distributed Face Processing Network
Jessica Goold

Modeling Affective States: Applications for Psychology and Neuroscience Research
Alison Mattek

Functional and Anatomical Relationships Between the Medial Precentral Cortex, Dorsal Striatum, and Head Direction Cell Circuitry
Max Mehlman

The Geometry of Observed Action Representation During Natural Vision
Samuel Nastase

Cognition, Calculation, and Emotion Regulation: Building an Effective Math Anxiety Intervention in the Lab and in the Classroom
Rachel Pizzie

Marketing to the Adolescent Brain: Neurobiological Vulnerability to Naturalistic Reward Cues Influences Health Risk Outcomes
Kristina Rapuano

2016-2017

Can Self-Regulation Be Improved? An Examination of Neural and Behavioral Evidence
Pin-Hao (Andy) Chen

The Neural Bases and Behavioral Characteristics of Feature Conjunction Learning
Sebastian Frank

Decoding Ambiguity in the Facial Expressions of Others: Neural Underpinnings of Affective Valence Computation
Justin Kim

Success Hangs in the Balance: Outcomes and Predictors of the Relative Balance of Brain Activity to Appetitive Cues
Richard Lopez

Interhemispheric Dynamic Coordination in Face Processing: A Time-Resolved fMRI Decoding Approach
Zhengang Lu

Behavioral and Neural Responses to Affectively Salient Cues: The Influence of Perceived Stress and Control
James Taylor

2015-2016

Dispositional Emotional Expressivity Shapes the Processing of Facial Expression
Annemarie Brown

The Functional Importance of the Head Direction Signal for Homing Behavior
William Butler

Relating Behavioral Control and Brain Development: Insights from Adolescence
Heidi Meyer

How We Connect: Neural Mechanisms Underpinning Human Social Networks
Carolyn Parkinson

Effects of Violent Video Game Play on Attitudes toward Behavioral Deviance: Mechanisms of Self-Involvement, Affective Responses, and Motivated Attitude Change
Anna Prescott

The Mental Workspace as Distributed Neural Network
Alexander Schlegel

Subtypes of Developmental Prosopagnosia: Behavioral and Neural Evidence
Hua Yang

The Nature of Feature Tuning Representations in Occipital, Parietal, and Frontal Cortices During Visual Working Memory Maintenance
Qing Yu

2014-2015

The Structure and Function of Brain Networks Underlying Self-Evaluation
Robert Chavez

The Cognitive Dynamics Underlying Decision-Making: Interactions Between Attention, Memory, and Reward in Action Control
Kanghoon Jung

Using the Eyes to Measure the Mind: Pupil Dilation Dynamics as a Biomarker of Online Attention
Olivia Kang

On the Nature, Mechanisms, and Neural Correlates of Visual Feature Conjunction Learning
Eric Reavis

Affective Decision-Making in Rhesus Monkeys: Reward Order, Risk, and the Roles of the Anterior Insula and Premotor Cortex
Eric Xu

2013-2014

Cortical Representations of Hierarchical Category Learning
Sergey Fogelson

Systematic Replications and Innovations in the Neuroscience of Humor
Sean Guillory

Whole Brain Hyperalignment: Inter-Subject Hyperalignment of Local Representational Spaces
Jyothi Swaroop Guntupalli

Motion and Position Interact at Both Early and Late Stages of the Human Visual System
Peter Jes Kohler

Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms of Social Motivations
Katherine Powers

Exercise and the Brain: Impacts on Cognition, Neural Function, and Mental Health
Andrea Robinson