Meet the Lab!
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Maureen Hilton
Lab Manager
Maureen graduated from Tufts University with a B.S in Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with a B.F.A in Animation and Printmaking. She was a member of the Women’s Crew team throughout college, and now in her free time she enjoys weightlifting, playing video games, and knitting.
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Cassie Eng
Graduate Student
Cassie is a graduate student in the Thiessen lab. Her research investigates the role attention plays in the acquisition of new knowledge and the corresponding brain-behavior associations. In particular, she focuses on how children obtain information from various multimedia sources. She graduated from Penn State in 2015 with a B.S. in Psychology and a minor in Neuroscience. After, she completed a 1-year research fellowship at Virginia Tech. In her free time, Cassie works out.
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Alice Russell
Research Assistant
Alice Russell is a junior cognitive neuroscience major from Baltimore, MD. She loves neuroscience, but also architecture, and has discovered that neuroarchitecture is a fascinating combination! She hopes to continue studying it in addition to learning Portuguese, making art, playing guitar, dancing, and running.
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Shrila Senthil
Research Assistant
Shrila Senthil is a Junior majoring in Cognitive Science and minoring in Human-Computer Interaction from San Jose, California. She loves learning about the intersection between technology, design, humanity, and so on. In her free time, she's a big fan of horror movies, painting, and all things Spotify!
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Yeonwoo Kim
Research Assistant
Yeonwoo is an undergraduate Cognitive Science major. She was born in Korea, and grew up in Northern Virginia. Outside of the lab, she sings in an acapella group and enjoys playing the violin.
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Emilie Zhou
Research Assistant
Emilie is a rising sophomore from Saratoga, California majoring in cognitive science and minoring in human-computer interaction. She's interested in learning more about how psychology and technology can be used together. In her free time, she enjoys baking, making different crafts, and binge watching movies..
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Suejin (Clara) Oh
Research Assistant
Suejin is an undergraduate public health policy major at Carnegie Mellon University. She is interested in developmental and neuropsychology and hopes to pursue medical school after graduation. Outside of the lab, she writes for The Women's Network and plays the flute. In her free time, she enjoys exercising, studying at aesthetic cafes, and going to art exhibitions.
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Karen Sabol
Research Assistant
Karen is a sophomore majoring in Cognitive Science. She is also in the Quantitative Social Science Scholars program. Karen was born in Pittsburgh but grew up in New Mexico. Outside of academics, she is involved in dance, Greek Life, and volunteering for the Brain Exercise Initiative. In her free time, she enjoys watching cheesy rom coms on Netflix.
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Audra Scheinman
Research Assistant
Audra is a junior studying Decision Science from Washington, D.C, and hopes to pursue medical school after college. She is really interested in human behavior and plays on the CMU Varsity Softball Team. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her family and Airedale Terrier, Ridley.
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Bethany Ricci
Research Assistant
Bethany is a junior studying cognitive neuroscience and is from the Pittsburgh area. She is interested in developmental and clinical psychology and hopes to attend medical school after graduation. In her free time, Bethany enjoys hanging out with friends and family, her dog, Jake, as well as dancing and kayaking.
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Jaeah Kim
Former Graduate Student
Jaeah was a long-time resident of the ILLL baby lab, starting as an undergrad research assistant in 2013, then as the NIRS lab manager and then a graduate student. She was a graduate student with Dr. Thiessen until 2021.
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Lucy Erickson
Former Graduate Student
Lucy worked with Dr. Thiessen as a graduate student from 2009-2015. She is currently a post-doc at the University of Maryland, College Park.
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Sandrine Girard
Former Graduate Student
Collaborators
Jenny Saffran, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jenny Saffran was Dr. Thiessen's adviser during his time as a graduate student. Her research focuses on the kinds of learning abilities required to master the complexities of language. Three broad issues characterize Dr. Saffran's work. One line of research asks what kinds of learning emerge in infancy. A second line of research probes the biases that shape human learning abilities, and the relationship between these biases and the structure of human languages. A third issue concerns the extent to which the learning abilities underlying this process are specifically tailored for language acquisition. Related research concerns infant music perception, and the relationship between music and language learning.
Katharine Graf-Estes, University of California - Davis
Katharine Graf-Estes is an assistant professor of psychology at UC Davis. Dr. Graf-Estes' research explores the mechanisms that support early learning. In particular, the ability to detect statistical regularities may play a fundamental role in how infants learn about a highly complex, highly salient aspect of the auditory world: language. Infants become especially attuned to regularities in the sound patterns of the ambient language, including its phoneme distinctions, sound combinations within words, and its cues to word boundaries in fluent speech. Thus, when infants begin to understand and produce words, they do not start as a blank slate.
Michael Kaschak, Florida State University
Mike Kaschak is an associate professor at Florida State University, and was Dr. Thiessen's graduate mentor at Wisconsin before moving on to warmer territory. Dr. Kaschak is interested in the role of perception and action planning in language comprehension. In addition, he is broadly interested in the role of learning and adaptation in in both language comprehension and language production.
Luca Onnis, Nanyang Technological University
Luca Onnis is an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University and director of LEAP Lab. Dr. Onnis is interested in bridging cognitive science and language learning/teaching. He conducts research combining computational and behavioral methods in order to understand the basic mechanisms of language learning. Theoretically and empirically motivated predictions can then be made to help improve language learning and teaching.
Anna Fisher, Carnegie Mellon University
Anna Fisher is the director of the Cognitive Development Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. Anna studies how young children learn and how they generalize knowledge. Generalization in humans is unique in many ways. For example, only humans exhibit evidence of the ability to organize categories into multiple levels of abstraction, create ad-hoc categories, establish arbitrary groupings, or engage in higher-order reasoning. Anna's research explores the development of uniquely human modes of learning and interference, with a particular focus on the development of category-based inductive reasoning. A related line of research explores the relationship between sustained attention and learning. Ultimately, this line of research seeks to apply insights from developmental cognitive psychology to improve children's learning in academic settings.
Philip Pavlik, University of Memphis
Dr. Pavlik completed his dissertation at Carnegie Mellon University, and has an appointment as part of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Intelligent Systems, and is director of the Optimal Learning Lab. The OLL works to identify models of human learning so that these models can be used by instruction software (such as artificially intelligent tutors) to sequence and schedule practice for best learning outcomes.