I am an associate professor in the School of Communication at The Ohio State University.

Here is my CV.

You can find copies of my papers here: Publications

Lab Website: Communication and Cognitive Systems Lab

Research Summary

My interdisciplinary program of research advances our understanding of how individuals and groups learn and use civic and science information.  I employ eye-tracking technology to investigate theoretical propositions about political learning and decision making that often cannot be adequately addressed using traditional survey and survey-experimental methods. By using this technique, I have been able either to confirm tenuous survey results, challenge those results, or pose new questions. Recently, I have leveraged machine-learning techniques to enhance the predictive and explanatory power of eye movements.  The long-term goal of my work is to understand the conditions that facilitate or inhibit sound decisions in a democratic society.  

Research and Teaching Background

My interdisciplinary expertise is reflected in my publishing record, as my papers have been published in flagship journals in three disciplines: communication (Journal of Communication,  Communication Research, Human Communication Research), psychology (Psychological Science), and political science (American Journal of Political Science). I have also published in top subfield journals (Political Communication, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience).

My work has received recognition from leading professional organizations, including the Walter Lippmann Best Article of the Year Award from the American Political Science Association, and Top Paper Awards from the International Communication Association and National Communication Association. This program of work has offered a fruitful training ground for junior researchers, yielding nine co-authored journal publications for seven graduate students and three undergraduate students who I trained in my lab. 

I have received recognition for my teaching and mentoring activities. For my efforts at involving undergraduate students in research, I received the Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award from the College of Arts and Sciences. For my efforts at mentoring and teaching graduate students, I received the Faculty Member of the Year Award from the School of Communication’s Graduate Student Organization.  I am the faculty advisor for OSU's Pilipino Student Association. I am the Director of the Ungraduate Program in the School of Communication.

I serve on the editorial boards at the Journal of Communication and Communication Research. I am a founding member and treasurer of ICA's Communication Science and Biology interest group.

I was previously a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2012 to 2013, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, having received my Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Illinois in August 2012.

Examples of Research

One crucial yet understudied aspect of the information environment is its temporal variability with political information frequently changing over time. This poses challenges for accurate memory retention.  My work found that eye movements can accurately assess people's memory for political information even when verbal reports fail to do so. This challenges the dependability of survey measures of political knowledge and introduces a novel approach to measuring memory in dynamic information settings. 

In another facet of my work, I have introduced the use of eye movements as real-time indicators of comprehension for political text and have leveraged these eye-movement data to predict real-world decisions on a broader scale. For instance, my research demonstrates that eye movement responses to actual ballot measures, varying in language difficulty and collected from 240 participants in the lab, successfully predicted decisions to abstain or vote against the same ballot measures in real elections involving millions of voters (total votes = 137 million).  

When examining groups, my research combines eye-tracking and social transmission approaches, uncovering that individuals can self-generate misinformation through misremembering, and person-to-person transmission can compound these errors. These findings underscore the potential of eye-tracking technology in transforming our understanding of political knowledge, memory, and comprehension across individuals and groups. Ultimately, my work provides insights for explaining and predicting real-world decisions on a large scale.