Interests

Research Interests

Vision research often reveals stark limitations to our visual processing, and yet the world feels subjectively rich to us. How do we explain this difference? A major motivation for my research has been to explore this issue by investigating the temporal dynamics and quality of perception and attention, and as a result the richness of our visual awareness over time. A particular interest of mine has been ensemble perception, the ability to quickly perceive the average of a group of objects (for example the average emotion of a group of faces, or average color color of leaves on a tree). Currently I'm expanding into investigations of temporal attention, using fMRI and computational modeling to better understand its underlying sensory and control level mechanisms.

I've also worked with the Schizophrenia Research Division at the Nathan Kline Institute, both as a research assistant and ongoing collaborator. Here I contributed to projects with the Cognitive Neurophysiology Lab researching sensory/cognitive deficits in schizophrenia, as well as with the Cognitive Psychopharmacology Program researching NMDAR dysfunction and potential drug therapies .

Community Engagement

I'm also very interested in science education in the community. I've done volunteer work with Biobus co-organizing events, recruiting volunteers and designing and running interactive stations to teach kids (and interested parents) about neuroanatomy, visual memory and optical illusions. I've done similar work with the World Science Festival and BioBase Harlem.