Research Interests

Scientific Communication in Psychology

As scientists, we often communicate with our peers, but we sometimes fail in making our research known and relevant to the public. Even in psychology curricula, we often leave training this skill to specific methods or science communication courses. In tandem with my belief that the discoveries of science should be relevant to students, I also aim to make sure that students are equipped to share their knowledge with others.

With the support of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, I am working on a project to make an instructional resource based on a group science communication project I assign to students in Cognitive Psychology. This resource will hopefully be online on STP’s website in Spring 2024. Concurrently, I am working on the assessment of both student perceptions and in-class writing on communicating dense scientific concepts in an easy to understand fashion.

Ambivalent Emotions in Music

Although we often make the associations of ‘major = happy’ and ‘minor = sad’ in Western music, we can experience many emotions beyond simple positive and negative affect when listening to music. At the same time, chord structures extend beyond simple major and minor triads. What are the ways in which tonalities can combine in horizontal harmony (across a sequence of pitches) and vertical harmony (across a single chord made of more than one pitch) that elicit mixed affect?

Along with Berthold Hoeckner, Stephen Van Hedger and Noah Bongiovanni, we are characterizing a particular musical construct (the seventh chord) and its ability to express mixed affect, such as ‘bittersweet’ or ‘nostalgic’. By varying psychoacoustic dimensions of the chord structure, we can manipulate the tendency to perceive such a chord as more happy or sad, potentially highlighting the cues that the average listener uses to perceive valence in music.

Teaching and Learning of Neuroscience

The way in which neuroscience is completed as a discipline relies on the expertise of many individuals and the utilization of many technologies and interdisciplinary collaboration. However, the way in which neuroscience is taught often occurs at a unitary level, focusing on the scale of molecules, or neurons, or brains, or people. This process runs the risk of diluting the experience of neuroscience for students.

Together with Rachel Branco, we are working to reconsider the ways in which we can (while under limited design constraints) implement deliberate cross-course assignments that can highlight the many ways in which a given topic (e.g. Alzheimer’s Disease) can be examined at various levels of scale within the nervous system. By introducing short assignments that share a common structure across our courses, we have preliminary findings to suggest that the sharing of a format promotes an interdisciplinary lens to the study of a particular neuroscientific phenomenon.

Dynamics of Auditory Reflective Attention in Speech-in-noise Processing

Picture this: You’re at a party (or a busy restaurant, or out on the streets in a busy city) and you’re having a conversation with someone. They say something that you think you’ve misheard, because it doesn’t seem to make much sense, but as they continue to talk, it becomes clear what they must have said instead. Has that happened to you before? It certainly has happened to me! And thus, a research question was born.

My doctoral thesis work focuses on untangling the temporal dynamics of what happens to our comprehension of a conversation as it unfolds. Specifically, I am interested in how speech that is initially difficult to comprehend is disambiguated as context builds over the course of a conversation or even a sentence. What is the information that we are storing when we initially hear speech? What are we referring back to when we correct our initial perception? And on what time course is this happening as we process words? Having established that we can indeed benefit from semantically related content presented after a word embedded in noise, I aimed to look at the brain activity underlying this complex behaviour using EEG.