Lab Director: Melissa Troyer, Ph.D (she/her)

Melissa is a new Assistant Professor of Cognitive Development in the Psychology Department at UNLV. She is also affiliated with UNLV's Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience. Melissa recently completed a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BrainsCAN Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Western Ontario. Her PhD in 2019 is from the Cognitive Science department at UCSD, where she conducted her dissertation work in the Kutas Cognitive Electrophysiology Laboratory.

Melissa's dissertation work investigated how individual differences in knowledge and experience (gleaned from fiction) might impact language comprehension in real time. This work combined approaches from several branches of cognitive science including cognitive electrophysiology, psycholinguistics, and approaches from the psychology of expertise. This research makes use of EEG and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to track the moment-by-moment neural and cognitive processes associated with language comprehension as people read sentences one word a time. Since then, she has built on this work to ask how differences in existing knowledge influence how people anticipate, make sense of, and potentially learn from language in real time. Current projects are extending this work to examine the dynamics of knowledge access during real-time language comprehension in older adulthood. A key research goal is to better characterize the relationship between knowledge and language across the adult lifespan into healthy aging.

At UNLV, Melissa is looking forward to helping students develop projects relating to language, aging, and knowledge (as well as related topics) using cognitive electrophysiology and behavioral methods in the LAKE Lab. Stay tuned for more updates!

CV

Publications

Graduate Assistant: Fernando Licea (he/him)

Fernando is a doctoral student in Neuroscience working as a grad assistant to help get the LAKE Lab started! His doctoral work is in the Hines group at UNLV, where his research interests primarily revolve around better understanding the role that inhibitory synapses play within the brain. He has a special interest in their ability to modulate the development of the brain and their implications in neurodevelopmental disorders. In LAKELab, Fernando is learning about human electrophysiology, focusing on ERPs that underlie language and learning.