Student Collaborators in My Research Lab

Below are some of the students I have worked with, from most to least recent (according to publication year of their first peer-reviewed publication, but I still work with some of them)--in their own words as well as with notes on their academic products (publications and presentations) resulting from our work. Each of these students has brought their own passion and unique perspective to my lab, and it has been an honor to work with them and watch them grow.

Note: Many of the students listed here were at Grinnell College. But now that I am at SUNY New Paltz, I am building a new lab and am ready brag about newer alumni from the New York reboot of my lab!

SUNY New Paltz students interested to chat about research ideas have an open invitation to drop by my office (WH 351). I almost always leave the door open when I'm there. If you like, please make an appointment through this link.

Oliver Similton '23 (Psychology)

"I was introduced to Damian because of my interest in how physics and psychology might overlap. Our conversation didn’t make much sense then-- I remember feeling like I needed a dictionary-- but I knew that I wanted to know more. I had the pleasure of working alongside him on 'Multifractal Auditory Stimulation Promotes the Effect of Multifractal Torso Sway on Spatial Perception' where we studied the role of auditory stimulation on bodily movement, specifically while manipulating the nonlinearity of such stimulation. Damian taught me about the research process at every scale and helped me become not only a more competent researcher, but a more confident one. That initial conversation and the lab meeting after catapulted me into a field that I could never have anticipated, and I couldn’t be happier to be a part of it. ."

Oliver recently graduated from SUNY New Paltz with a major in Psychology. They are currently completing their Master's degree in our 4+1 MS Program in Psychological Science (LinkedIn).

Marty Allen '23 (Computer Science)

"After completing Intro to Psychology under Damian's guidance, I had the privilege of collaborating with him on a fascinating research project. Together, we delved into the realm of 'Multifractal Auditory Stimulation Promotes the Effect of Multifractal Torso Sway on Spatial Perception.' My role involved crafting the audio stimuli crucial for our experiment. I appreciate Damian's commitment to fostering a learning environment where students are encouraged to explore ideas and contribute actively to the research process. I am grateful for the opportunity to have collaborated with Damian, and I carry forward the valuable lessons learned from our research endeavors into my academic and professional journey."

Marty recently graduated from Grinnell College with a major in Computer Science. He intends to become a data scientist with a focus on machine learning engineering (LinkedIn).

Oliver and Marty's Publication

Kelty-Stephen, D. G., Similton, O.*, Rabinowitz, E.*, & Allen, M. (2023). Multifractal auditory stimulation promotes the effect of multifractal torso sway on spatial perception: Evidence from distance perception by blindwalking. Ecological Psychology, 35, 136-182. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2023.2287752

The gist: Manipulations of nonlinearity in auditory stimulation interacts with the nonlinearity in participants' own bodily movements, and this interaction can impact how we use our bodies to perceive how far we have walked.

Quinn Berleman-Paul '21 (Psychology)

"After having Damian as a professor for Research Methods, I had the opportunity to assist Noah Jacobsen on a research project they had been formulating together. We examined the "quiet eye" approach to visually-guided aiming behavior in a golf task where manipulation of eye height was at play. In particular, I helped with the motion capture and multifractality modeling of postural sway. I always enjoyed the different approaches and ways of thinking between Damian and I - it allowed me to understand concepts on an entirely new level. Working in Damian's lab taught me how much goes into crafting and conducting an experiment, how to create unique solutions for data capture when problems with the original plan arise, and that there is always more to learn! I am truly grateful for the opportunity to conduct this research with Damian and for all that I learned from him and the research process in his laboratory."

Quinn recently graduated from Grinnell College with a double major in Psychology and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies. She returned as a Post-Baccalaureate Partners in Education Academic Coach for the 2021-2022 school year. She currently works as at a bilingual secondary school in Zaragoza (LinkedIn).

Noah Jacobson '20 (Psychology)

“My main research project with Damian was extremely rewarding. I created a sports psychology independent study, reached out to Damian about it for guidance, and he offered an opportunity for me to turn it into a full-blown proposal. Through this process, I discovered an important nuance I wanted to explore on my topic of Quiet Eye (QE) that connected to an area Damian was interested in (postural sway). Fast-forward a year and I had crafted and carried out my study, met with researchers, toured a QE expert’s lab, and was writing up a paper for publication. Damian allowed me to get real experience using statistical software and implement study designs, provided support when I struggled or had questions, and helped me make connections to others in the field of QE (not even his area of expertise), all the while giving me the freedom to answer the questions I wanted to. Not to mention, it’s a pretty rewarding feeling when your paper gets published and is read by the foremost expert on said topic!”

Noah taught for Lindamood-Bell, an online education company after graduating in 2020. He currently works for the Center to Improve Veteran Involvement in Care at the Portland VA Medical Center as a research assistant, studying the effects of opioid discontinuation and telehealth interventions, and coaches a running club in his spare time.

Noah and Quinn's Publication

Jacobson, N.*, Berleman-Paul, Q.*, Zbaracki, J.*, Mangalam, M., Kelty-Stephen, D. G., & Ralston, C. (2021). Multifractality in postural sway supports quiet eye training in aiming tasks: A study of golf putting. Human Movement Science, 102752. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.humov.2020.102752 (Postprint on ResearchGate)

The gist: Visually-aimed behaviors can be challenging. We can try to choreograph our many body parts to enact the movement (e.g., the golf-putt swing), but a potentially more effective strategy is to focus our visual attention on the target and to let our body figure out the details on its own. The latter strategy of "quieting the eye" on a target can be much more effective than explicit training of how this arm, that leg, etc. should all move in concert. This "quiet eye" strategy rests on the fact that visual attention depends on a rich postural support. Our visual attention is rooted in the task environment through our tactile contact with the ground. And the nonlinear structure in our postural sway is an important resource our body has in mediating between vision and touch.

Christopher Bell '18 (Psychology)

"I spent nearly every semester at Grinnell College working with Damian in some capacity. He fostered my interests in perception and action, and working in his lab helped me to learn what was required of a researcher. Working with Damian was amazing because of how caring and supportive he is. He listens to his student's ideas and helps form them into a whole project - always with the full intention of a tangible result, be it presentation or publication. I am very glad to have worked with him so often as an undergraduate and look forward to one day adopting his lab's teaching to my own set of students."

Chris taught with City Year in Jacksonville, Florida after graduating, worked on data analysis at Pramata, and remained synched into educational activities since then. He is currently on track to get his Ph.D. in psychology at University of Georgia with Drew Abney.

Chris's Publication

Bell, C. A.*, Carver, N. S.*, Zbaracki, J.*, & Kelty-Stephen, D. G. (2019). Nonlinear amplification of variability through interaction across scales supports greater accuracy in manual aiming: Evidence from a multifractal analysis with comparisons to linear surrogates in the Fitts task. Frontiers in Physiology, 10, 998. (Open Access)

The gist: Our ability to precisely meet and anticipate the constraints of even very simple motor tasks depends on a rich cross-scale interactivity through our physiological systems. We can estimate this cross-scale interactivity in our hands and in our heads and then use those estimates to predict how our full-bodied engagement in the context supports our ability to anticipate and to navigate uncertainty.

Rachel Ward '18 (Psychology and Russian)

"Over the course of a summer and fall term, I worked with Damian on a couple projects involving the role of formant structure in language perception and reading comprehension. Most of the research that I did with Damian was based on subtle transformations of the linear structure of linguistic sounds. We designed an experiment, collected data from Grinnell College students, completed statistical analysis, and presented a poster at the annual MPA Conference in Chicago. I’m glad that I had the opportunity to gain research experience, to learn as a process of doing, and to experience a form of education that isn’t always possible within a classroom. I really enjoyed working with Damian because he genuinely cares about his students and is always willing to advise, but also prefers to give his students freedom to explore ideas, be creative in research, and learn through trial and error. I always appreciate and trust Damian’s feedback and I really enjoyed having him as a research mentor."

Rachel spent her summer after graduating from Grinnell College working in Odessa as a missionary intern doing humanitarian work in Odessa, Ukraine with Action International. She then worked as a behavioral therapist at Westside Behavior Therapy, LLC. She now works as a researcher for the Veterans' Affairs Portland Health Care System in Oregon.

Rachel's Publication

Ward, R. M., & Kelty-Stephen, D. G. (2018). Bringing the nonlinearity of the movement system to gestural theories of language use: Multifractal structure of spoken English supports the compensation for coarticulation in human speech perception. Frontiers in Physiology, 9, 1152. (Available on ResearchGate)

The gist: Our perception of speech is sensitive to fine-grained temporal structure of the actions speakers use to make sounds, and that fine-grained temporal structure from speakers' actions echoes through the bodies of listeners.

Rachel's Presentation

Ward, R.*, Viswanathan, N., & Kelty-Stephen, D. G. (2018, April). Imperceptible formant-preserving randomization of speech weakens subsequent phoneme perception. Poster presented at the 90th annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, IL.

Nicole Carver '19 (Psychology and Russian)

"I have worked on multiple projects with Damian ranging from modeling honeybee hive coordination to mother-infant interaction models to using motion-capture suits to study changes caused by perturbations in visual input (aka we made undergrads wear silly glasses and suits and throw beanbags). The diversity of things you work on and learn while working with Damian is definitely what makes his lab an experience unlike any other. Working with Damian has given me numerous opportunities to present research at conferences for groups such as The Society for Research in Child Development as an undergraduate. Damian is a great professor to work with and has become a great adviser for my own academic career."

Nicole worked with me in Summer 2016, spent Summer 2017 working with Prof. Lisa Oakes at University of California-Davis, and after Spring 2018 studying abroad in Russia, returned to work with me again at the University of Iowa through the FUTURE in Biomedicine program. For all four years of undergrad, she also worked in the Grinnell College Child Development Studies Program (Facebook) directed by Prof. Ann Ellis. Nicole is about to graduate from Grinnell College. She is currently completing a Ph.D. program with Paula Silva at University of Cincinnati's Department of Psychology in their Center for Cognition, Action, and Perception.

Nicole and Danica's Publications

Carver, N. S., & Kelty-Stephen,D. G. (2017). Multifractality in individual honeybee behavior hints at colony-specific social cascades: Reanalysis of RFID data from five different colonies. Physical Review E, 95, 022402. (Available on ResearchGate)

The gist: Statistically nonlinear interactions across scales in individual bees' movements predict specifically which colony a bee belongs to.

Carver, N. S., Bojovic, D., & Kelty-Stephen, D. G. (2017). Multifractal foundations of visually-guided aiming and adaptationto prismatic perturbation. Human Movement Science, 55, 61-72. (Available on ResearchGate)

The gist: Tailoring our actions to our vision depends on the spread of nonlinearity across the body. Greater nonlinearity in movement leads to greater flexibility to change in visual information.

Eason, E. G., Carver, N. S., Kelty-Stephen, D. G., & Fausto-Sterling, A. Bidirectional, multimodal relationships in the sex-dependent interactions in mother-infant dyad revealed using vector-autoregressive modeling. Under review at PLoS ONE.

The gist: Children change their parents behavior no less than parents change their childrens' behavior. Parents might bring social/cultural gender norms to these interactions

Presentations

Carver, N. S., & Kelty-Stephen, D. G. (2017, April). Fractality of threshold crossings for individual honeybees reflect colony-specific coordination. Poster presented at the 89th annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, IL.

Eason, E. G., Carver, N. S., Kelty-Stephen, D. G., & Fausto-Sterling, A. (2017, April). Maternal response to infant behavior differs by sex: Boys are rewarded for independence whereas girls lose same rewards. Poster presented at the biannual meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Austin, TX.

Lee, J. T., Carver, N. S., & Kelty-Stephen, D. G. (2016, December). Hierarchical organizations imposing interdependent coordination amongst independent agents: Cascade simulation and empirical honeybee model. Invited symposium paper at The Network Science of Squads, an Army Research Office workshop at the Center for Nonlinear Science, Denton, TX.

Danica Bojovic '19 (Biology with Neuroscience Concentration)

"I worked with Damian on a study of relationships between perception and body movement. We used motion-capture suits to measure the changes in movement before and after participants wore visual-shifting goggles. We also helped the Grinnell Regional Medical Center set up an experiment using acoustic stimulation as a method for treating symptoms of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder (COPD). The thing that I value the most about Damian’s lab is that he is a big fan of interdisciplinary research, so working with him meant thinking about different aspects of medicine, biomechanics, math and statistics, psychology, and ultimately mind and philosophy. Working with Damian often meant getting out of my comfort zone and thinking about science in a very broad sense. Most importantly, I gained a life-long adviser (yes, I will ask for advice even when I’m 30-something), learned from an amazing partner (shout-out to Nicole), and realized I want to do a lot more research because it’s FUN."

Danica spent Summer 2017 doing neuroscience research as well as crucial revisions for our paper with Nicole. She spent Fall 2017 at U. Montpellier in the south of France, and she spent Summer 2018 in Amsterdam at the Vrije University. She is now getting her Ph.D. in Neuroscience with Henrique von Gersdorff at Oregon Health & Science University.

And I swear I did not provide any compensation for her use of the word "fun" to describe research.

Avantika Johri '18 (Psychology with Neuroscience Concentration)

"I worked with Damian in collaboration with another professor Anurag Rimzhim from Central Connecticut State University. Our research was focused on the orthographic basis of the Hindi language--whether or not the fundamental units of Hindi writing are letters or syllables. We tested this question using letter transposition (e.g., spelling words with the letters in swapped order, like foerst instead of forest) to see which kinds of transpositions were most likely recognized as non-words. Data collection was in India over the summer, and so we had to get the study just right before I left. The planning stages of the experiment took about half a year, and Damian was helpful every time I was stuck or had a problem. Even when I was in India collecting the data, and when we had to collaborate over e-mail and Skype calls, Damian was incredibly resourceful and managed to guide me from over 8000 miles away."

I worked with Avantika in Summer 2016. Avantika spent Summer 2017 working as an intern in a business in India and graduated from Grinnell College in 2018. She is now a senior analyst at MediaMath.

Avantika's Publications

Rimzhim, A., Johri, A., Kelty-Stephen, D. G., Fowler, C., & Katz, L. Transposition effects in visual word recognition in Hindi. Manuscript in preparation.

The gist: South-Asian writing systems like Hindi consist of letters and of syllables that typically pair letters. Hindi readers seem to pay attention to letters.

Presentations

Rimzhim, A., Johri, A., Kelty-Stephen, D. G., & Fowler, C. A. (2017, November). Transposition effects in Hindi support its functionally alphabetic nature. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Rimzhim, A., Johri, A., Kelty-Stephen, D. G., & Fowler, C. A. (2017, August). Functionally alphabetic nature of aksharic orthographies of South Asia. Poster presented at the 11th International Workshop on Writing Systems and Literacy, Nagoya, Japan.

Rimzhim, A., Johri, A., Kelty-Stephen, D. G., Fowler, C. A., & Katz, L. (2017, May). Transposition effects support the functionally alphabetic nature of Hindi. Poster presented at the 29th annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, Boston, MA.

Rimzhim, A., Johri, A., Kelty-Stephen, D. G., Fowler, C., & Katz, L. (2016, November). Transposition effects in visual word recognition in Hindi. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston MA.

June Lee '18 (Mathematics and Psychology)

"I have done research under Damian for several semesters on dynamic systems theory using multifractality from a theoretic perspective and in the context of econophysics. I first met Damian because I asked one of my professors if there is more to ANOVAs in psychological research. That professor sent me to Damian, and Damian spent an hour telling me about fractals, multifractals, and other crazy concepts and how they apply in psychology—it was amazing. Admittedly, I hardly understood any of it at first, but learning these concepts and their ubiquitous applications from Damian has helped me grow as a mathematician, psychologist, coder, and student. He somehow manages to relate his research to every academic field that interests me, so I always come back to him for suggestions."

June's Publications

Lee, J. T., & Kelty-Stephen,D. G. (2017). Cascade-driven series with narrower multifractal spectra than their surrogates: Standard deviation of multipliers changes interactions across scales. Complexity, 2017, 7015243. (Open Access; Available on ResearchGate)

The gist: Developmental progression following nonlinear interactions across scale will often seem more heterogeneous than linear development but can seem much more uniform than linear development.

Wallot, S., Lee, J. T., & Kelty-Stephen, D. G. Switching between reading tasks leads to phase-transitions in reading times in L1 and L2 readers. PLoS ONE, 14, e0211502. (Open Access; Available on ResearchGate)

Presentations

Lee, J. T., & Kelty-Stephen, D. G.(2017, April). Narrative structure supports recurrent patterning of single-word reading times. Poster presented at the 89th annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, IL.

Elizabeth Eason '17 (Mathematics with Statistics Concentration)

"I collaborated with Damian, Hannah Brown, and Chase Booth on three different research projects during my first semester of my second year. The project on which I was first-author dealt with the interactions between infants and their caretakers, and how those interactions differed based on the sex of the infant. I learned and successfully used vector autoregression and impulse-response functions to model these relationships and presented my research at the Jean Piaget Society annual conference in Toronto, Canada, as well as in a JRC 101 talk with my collaborator and famous professor of gender Anne Fausto-Sterling."

Elizabeth is currently Senior Data Scientist at Everest Reinsurance Company. (LinkedIn)

Hannah Brown '16 (Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies)

"I had the pleasure of working on a couple projects with Damian, but my most exciting project was a chapter for a handbook from the London School of Economics on complexity science. As a Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies major, I did not always have the first pick of research projects, but Damian empowered me to use my interdisciplinary background. In the process, I grew as a writer, researcher and even learned about mathematical principles I never would have otherwise been able to learn."

Hannah is a Ph.D. student in Counseling Psychology at University of Florida (LinkedIn).

Elizabeth and Hannah's Publications

The gist: Children change their parents behavior no less than parents change their childrens' behavior. Parents might bring social/cultural gender norms to these interactions.

Booth, C. R., Brown, H. L., Eason, E. G., Wallot, S.,& Kelty-Stephen, D. G. (2016). Expectations onhierarchical scales of discourse: Multifractality predicts both short- and long-range effects of violating gender expectations in text-reading. Discourse Processes. (Available on ResearchGate)

The gist: Statistical indexes of nonlinearity across time scales in narrative reading quantifies the construction of an expectation built across a story, and these indexes predict how individual readers will interpret single words that align or misalign with those expectations.

Brown, H. L., Booth, C. R., Eason, E. G., & Kelty-Stephen, D. G. (in press). Multifractal signatures of intersectionality: Nonlinear dynamics permits quantitative modeling of hierarchical patterns in gender dynamics at the cultural level. In E. Mitleton-Kelly, A. Paraskevas, & C. Day (Eds.), Handbook of research methods in complexity science and their application. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. (Available on ResearchGate)

The gist: The challenges of "intersectionality" in social sciences, e.g., gender studies, often discourage quantitative methods and make qualitative analysis seem the only option. However, the challenges of intersectionality actually pervade scientific studies of complex systems, and the same multifractal modeling that has helped quantitative modeling of interactions across time scale may open up new insights where social sciences have identified intersectionality.

Presentations

Eason, E. G., Kelty-Stephen, D. G., & Fausto-Sterling, A. (2015, June). Gender development during the presymbolic stage: Disentangling infant-caretaker interactions using vector autoregressive and impulse response modeling. Poster presented at the 45th annual meeting of the Jean Piaget Society, Toronto.

Dan Teng '15 (Psychology)

"Conducting research with Damian was an incredibly rewarding experience, which was one of the highlights my student life. He provided me with the opportunity to combine my interest in linguistics with psychology. As a result, our research focused primarily on the impact of task-dependency and narrative coherence on the mental lexicon. The project continues to have a tremendous impact on my life and work as I gain the ability to conduct complex data collection and to use this resource to inform my reasoning and judgment. His guidance and expertise in this field has provided plenty of insight and remarkable discoveries when it comes to the multifractality of reactions to perceived stimuli in different environmental settings. I thank Damian for the opportunity to grow under his instruction, and learn from his expertise especially when it comes to conducting research and publishing."

Dan worked as a Grants and Mission-Related Investments Coordinator at the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation but now works as a software engineer at Showtime (LinkedIn)

Charlie Eddy '16 (Russian)

"My research with Damian spanned multiple semesters, projects, and classes (and I had no professor more inspiring or who instructed me more on methods of critical thinking). It was spurred by a half-baked idea I had for a gadget. That may seem out of the ordinary from a typical conception of a statistical lecture, because it is. Damian's ramblings relate large amounts of information to the subject immediately at hand. This means topics are wide-ranging. For my research, that meant a half-baked gadget led directly (as in: "do not pass go, do not collect $200") to a serious engagement with fundamental theories of stimulus and response, formal systems generally as they relate to psychology, and fractal analysis of physiological data. I recall these studies all the time - it informs most of my data collection habits during my day job, and much more of my curiosity."

Charlie has worked at Occipital, Inc., a company in California specializing in tracking and sensing.

Dan and Charlie's Publications

Teng, D. W., Eddy, C. L., & Kelty-Stephen, D. G. (2016). Non-visually-guided distance perception depends on matching torso fluctuations between training and test. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 78, 2320-2328. (Available on ResearchGate)

The gist: When we walk around outside, our torso fluctuations contain statistical nonlinear interactions across scales that predict how we use mechanical information from walking to perceive distance.

Teng, D. W., Wallot, S., & Kelty-Stephen, D. G. (2016). Single-word recognition need not depend on single-word features: Narrative coherence counteracts effects of single-word features that lexical decision emphasizes. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 45, 1451-1472. (Available on ResearchGate)

The gist: The speed at which we perceive words follows single-word features like frequency or number of similarly-spelled words, but that is only true when we are reading single words at a time. The narrative structure of stories (or "connected text") gradually forces our attention away from single-word features and leads us to process words in terms of the surrounding narrative structure.

Kelty-Stephen, D. G., & Eddy, C. L. (2015). Self-trained perception need not be veridical: Striking can exaggerate judgments and transfer exaggeration to new stimuli. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 77, 1854-1862. (Available on ResearchGate)

The gist: For people who are normally or corrected-to-normally sighted, removing vision temporarily leads perception by touch to wildly overestimate the length of unseen objects grasped in the hand--even with repeated experience getting accurate mechanical information from tapping those unseen objects against a surface.

Eddy, C. L., & Kelty-Stephen, D. G. (2015). Nesting of focal within peripheral vision promotes interactions across nestedtime scales in head sway: Multifractal evidence from accelerometry duringmanual and walking-based Fitts tasks. Ecological Psychology, 27, 43-67. (Available on ResearchGate)

The gist: Peripheral vision nests the focal view "where you're looking." Removing peripheral vision with blinders on the sides of our heads change how our visually-guided behaviors exhibit nonlinear interactions across nested time scales.

Presentations

Eddy, C. L., Dixon, J. A., & Kelty-Stephen, D. G. (2015, July). Head-sway multifractality carries optical nestings to visual and haptic perception. Poster presented at the 18th International Conference of Perception and Action, Minneapolis, MN.

Marty Allen '23 (Computer Science)

Marty recently graduated from Grinnell College with a major in Computer Science. He intends to become a data scientist with a focus on machine learning engineering (LinkedIn).

Noah and Quinn's Publication