I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Yale Department of Psychology. I study human cognition with behavioral and neuroimaging experiments.
My research is devoted to two very different topics. My first focus is visual perception. I have investigated several topics in this domain. I am interested in how the visual system perceives structure, and the consequences of perceptual organization. This was the focus of my graduate thesis, in which I reported a novel form of perceptual grouping due to non-local cues ("induced grouping") and a novel form of grouping due to learned association ("associative grouping"). I have also investigated visual crowding (discovering an effect we termed "supercrowding"), as well as visual attention and spatial context learning. I continue to pursue elements of this research program at Yale in the lab of Dr. Marvin Chun.
A second focus of mine is the domain of reward and decision-making in perception and behavior. First, with Dr. Marvin Chun, I conduct studies that ask whether associating rewards with images alters perception and visual representation. Secondly, with Dr. Chun and in collaboration with Dr. Daeyeol Lee, I am investigating learning and memory in decision-making under uncertainty, in contexts in which each decision depends on prior choices and outcomes.
Currently:
(Spring 2008- ) Post-doctoral associate Yale University
Formerly:
(2003-2008) Ph.D. Harvard University Dept. of Psychology. I was part of Dr. Yuhong Jiang's Visual Cognition lab and the Harvard Vision Sciences Lab.
(1998-2002) B.S. Vanderbilt University, Computer Science and Psychology . I also spent a year (2002-2003) as a computer programmer / research assistant for Dr. Tom Palmeri, Dr. Isabel Gauthier, and Dr. Randolph Blake at Vanderbilt University.