vocal perception action lab

Research domains and projects

Data Science Teaching and Learning

In collaboration with co-PI Aileen Bailey, I am conducting an NSF-funded project to develop and assess undergraduate data science courses for psychology students. We will investigate how data science training impacts psychology students’ cognitive abilities and confidence in their preparation for academic and professional experiences. We will ultimately publish our data science course materials as Open Educational Resources so that other educators can adapt them for their own curricula.

Music perception and production

Music is a universal human behavior that requires the coordinated use of auditory, motor, emotional, and executive functions. Popular topics within this field include the development of music preferences, song memory, the acquisition of performance skills, individual differences in perception and production, music and emotion, and the relationship between music and language.

Music memory

We are currently investigating how listeners encode and recall acoustic features of popular music. We present brief excerpts from popular songs. Some of the excerpts are presented in their original form while others have been acoustically modified. Participants listen to the excerpts and guess song and artist names. We hope to illuminate how listeners access song memories and reveal the role of specific acoustic parameters in music memory.

Language processing and crossmodal perception

For most people, understanding spoken language is no more difficult than identifying objects in a room. However, the automaticity of speech perception belies its complexity. Accumulating evidence suggests that our special speech ability might be an emergent property of multiple general perceptual, motor, and cognitive processes that can interact with each other.