cognitive psychology PhD
ABOUT ME
Cognitive psychology PhD with a focus on language comprehension and science learning, conducted via fMRI, eye-tracking and machine learning.
Familiar methodology includes behavioral assessment of language, surveys/questionnaire design, fMRI neuroimaging design, connectome-based predictive modeling, eye-tracking design, and learning in virtual environments.
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Personal interests include reading, cooking, with some light gaming here and there.
CURRENT PROJECTS
The Reading Brain
The Reading Brain Project, an NSF-funded study that aims to understand the neurocognitive processes underlying scientific text comprehension by adult native speakers (N=50) , non-native second language readers (N=56) , and middle-school students (N=52). The study consists of multimodal neuroimaging data from resting-state fMRI, task-based fixation-related fMRI, and DTI. Participants also completed a battery of cognitive tests including standardized measures of executive functions (inhibition, planning, and working memory), language performance (expository and narrative reading comprehension and vocabulary), and language and reading background surveys recording self-reported language proficiency and reading habits.
Results have shown that reading performance correlates with connectivity in semantic integration regions. Additionally, readers’ e-device usage negatively correlates with activity in the right dlPFC and cerebellum for texts with higher centrality, suggesting that electronic habits may affect skills in integrating conceptual representation. Finally, Representation Similarity Analysis shows that semantic models predicted brain activity better than visual models for L1 but not L2 readers, suggesting that L2 proficiency influences conceptual representation quality.
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For more details, the project data has been made available on OpenNeuro as an open-science data sharing initiative! See https://openneuro.org/datasets/ds001857/versions/1.1.1 for more information.
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Have fun with the data, and happy researching!
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RELATED LINKS
The Brain, Language and Computation Lab
Interested in the neural and computational bases of language representation and learning, our research specifically addresses issues of neuroplasticity, individual differences, and knowledge representation in the human brain. For more information please refer to our lab website by clicking on the icon.
Social, Life, and Engineering Sciences Imagine Center
SLEIC provides the Penn State research community with instrumentation, technological substantive expertise, and educational opportunities for MRI and EEG experiments.
Center for Language Science
The Center for Language Science (CLS), located in the Moore Building, is an interdisciplinary group of linguists, psycholinguists, applied linguists, speech-language pathologists, speech scientists, and cognitive neuroscientists who share an interest in language acquisition and bilingualism.
