My Focus
I have spent my first years in the Urgent Choice Lab focusing on the interplay between attentional mechanisms and urgent choices. In particular, the novel design of the lab's tasks allowed us to discern large effects on performance due to stimulus repetition, and to tease apart temporally intricate interactions between the perceptual evaluation and motor planning aspects of a decision.
Thereafter, we designed a new urgent task that pits exogenous and endogenous attentional mechanisms against each other during an ongoing motor choice. Our goal was to characterize the interaction between these two forms of attention at the neural level; that is, to determine how this interaction is manifest within oculomotor planning circuits during saccadic choices.
The Road Here...
I completed my undergrad degree at Norwich University (Northfield, VT), graduating in 2015 with a BSc in Athletic Training and Health Sciences, accompanied by minors in Health and Biology. While there, I played on the Women's rugby team eventually captaining the team in my junior and senior years. It was my experience between these programs of study and being the leader of a team that ignited my curiosity regarding the way in which we formulate decisions.
Athletes face countless decisions within game play. Particularly, one's ability to make urgent accurate decisions and translate them into practice is of utmost importance when it comes to high level athletic performance. There is plenty of research detailing how attention and the perception of a visual scene may impact decisions, but it is still unclear how exactly these processes unfold over time. Upon looking into graduate programs that would allow me to pursue research in decision making, I stumbled upon the work of Drs. Terrence Stanford and Emilio Salinas and realized that their Urgent Choice Lab studies precisely what I am interested in — how critical decisions are made under time pressure!
My experience in the Neuroscience PhD program was all-encompassing. I participated in laboratory research, was a teaching assistant for the Intro to Neuroscience undergraduate lab course, and was a member of the Admissions Committee, the Neuroscience Research Day Committee, and the Brain Awareness Council. As mentioned, the drive for my research interest largely stems from athletics, so my time outside the program was mostly dedicated to my new love of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu!