Research & Job Opportunities

My research primarily investigates how the different senses interact (vision, sound, taste, smell, and touch) to influence our perceptual and emotional experiences. I am also involved in collaborative open science and replication projects, and in research on metascience (how science can be better). To answer my research questions, I use experimental and survey techniques including behavior and psychophysics.

My research is broadly on the strategic search for knowledge. How does an agent recognize that more knowledge is needed? What knowledge should it search for, and how does it combine primitive search operations to do it? And when it receives an answer, how does it verify its accuracy, or when does it give up? Specifically, I am interested in human information seeking behavior, memory mechanisms in agent architectures, inference in semantic networks, and reinforcement learning of memory use.

How do humans recycle previous knowledge to aid them in novel situations? To answer this question, I first design a task. I then compare how humans and artificial neural networks approach this task, and I do this by measuring both 1) the behavior of humans and neural networks and 2) the neural codes that emerge while learning the task. My nitty gritty methods are primarily EEG and fMRI for human neuroimaging, and MatLab or Python for data analysis and neural network modeling.

My current research focuses on how to reconcile the diversity of scientific practices (the fact that different areas of scientific inquiry use different methods to investigate and describe different kinds of entities) with the unity of the object of scientific study (the fact that these different areas of science are in some sense studying the same thing). I’m specifically focused on the relationship between cognitive phenomena such as linguistic competence and neurophysiological phenomena that in some way subserve them, and in understanding how practitioners in different areas of cognitive science understand that relationship. This is primarily conceptual / philosophical work reflecting on the commitments and assumptions of empirical research in cognitive science.

My main areas of interest are the perception of art and music, multisensory integration (how auditory and visual information combine in the brain), and emotion and expression perception. I often conduct experiments by tracking behavior, measuring brain states using EEG, or looking at participants eye-gaze patterns.

My research interests revolve around brain areas that control motivation, pleasure, and disgust. My current work focuses on neuroanatomical tracing in rat brain tissue - this technique highlights connections between specific brain areas. I also track regions of the rat brain that are activated or altered by drugs of abuse; this is done by highlighting drug-affected neuron groups using immunofluorescence staining.