Research Projects
Overview
My work on visual attention and working memory at the University of Chicago will begin in Fall 2025. Below are selected projects I’ve contributed to as a research assistant at UCSB, ordered by most recent.
Psychological and Brain Sciences Honors Program — UCSB
Evaluating ongoing thoughts during behavioral tasks can offer valuable insight into underlying cognitive processes. Yet, despite their ubiquity, dimensions of thought are often overlooked in experimental psychology, where researchers typically prioritize the assessment of task performance and neglect the accompanying mental experience.
In this study, we used experience sampling to investigate the phenomenology of task-relevant thoughts during memory encoding for verbal and visual stimuli. By emphasizing the intricate relationship between external stimuli, inner experience, and memory encoding, this work calls for a more integrative approach that incorporates phenomenological perspectives in the study of cognition.
A procedure flowchart of the memory experiment. Participants first studied images and words with intermittent thought probes. Then, they completed a digit span task to prevent information maintenance strategies in working memory. Finally, participants underwent a recognition memory test including previously studied stimuli and intermixed foils.
Memory, Emotion, Thought, and Awareness (META) Lab — UCSB
In the META Lab, we study how fluctuations in conscious experience influence cognitive performance. My work has focused on the role of mind-wandering and internal distraction during memory encoding, particularly in relation to stimulus memorability. Using experience sampling, behavioral experiments, and recognition testing, we aim to understand how internal cognitive states interact with perceptual properties of stimuli to shape long-term memory outcomes. This research sits at the intersection of meta-awareness, attention, and memory.
Phases of the procedure for Experiment 1 from a manuscript I contributed to. Participants completed a study phase where they encoded 24 complex visual scenes. Then, after a digit span distractor task, they completed a recognition memory test.
Perception, Cognition, and Action (PCA) Lab — UCSB
Research in the PCA Lab centers on spatial working memory and the neural mechanisms supporting uncertainty representation. I’ve contributed to a series of studies exploring how people encode, maintain, and report imprecise memories for visual locations. These studies incorporate eye-tracking, EEG, and psychophysical methods to investigate moment-to-moment fluctuations in confidence and memory precision. I contributed to multiple projects aimed to understand how visual uncertainty is represented and used when people make decisions about what they remember.
Example task design from Li and Sprague (2023).
Attention Lab — UCSB
The Attention Lab focuses on the dynamics of value-driven attentional capture and cognitive control in complex environments. I contributed to experiments examining how distractor timing and reward learning shape attention in virtual and augmented reality settings. These studies use EEG and behavioral data to assess how motivational salience and environmental context influence attentional filtering. We are especially interested in how attention operates when faced with conflicting or highly distracting information — a key issue in real-world cognition.
Example plot from Milner et al. (2023).