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