Marlie Tandoc

Marlie Tandoc

PhD candidate, researcher, psychologist, neuroscientist

University of Pennsylvania

About

I am a mixed methods researcher with 8+ years of experience researching human behavior and psychology. I am currently a PhD Student at UPenn in the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab studying how people learn and remember. I have also conducted user research in the gaming industry at Riot Games where I uncovered complex patterns in user social behavior and drove the design of new features on PC and mobile.

I am currently open to work! Please contact me for a copy of my resume.

Interests
  • Quantitative and qualitative methods
  • Data analysis, visualization, statistics
  • Understanding how people/users think
Education
  • PhD in Psychology, Spring 2025

    University of Pennsylvania

  • MA in Psychology, 2020

    University of Pennsylvania

  • BSc in Psychology, Book & Media Studies, 2018

    University of Toronto

Selected Projects

Select a project to read more

Memory errors in behavior, brains, and machines
Our memories are not perfect recordings of the past. But instead are prone to error, misinformation, and bias. As part of my PhD, I am identifying what memories are most susceptible to such errors. By combining behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, and artificial neural networks, I show that similar memory errors exist in the human brain and in AI. I also find that these biases are not random mistakes, but are a product of an optimal learning system.
Memory errors in behavior, brains, and machines
Impacts of indoor air quality on cognitive performance
From school to work, we spend a lot of time indoors. In this wide-scale collaboration between psychologists, engineers, and chemists, we are researching how everyday fluctuations in indoor air quality impacts cognition. We find that CO2, as well as common household fragrance products, negatively impact decision-making. This work provides actionable insights into why good building ventilation is so important.
Impacts of indoor air quality on cognitive performance
When is the best time to learn?
Not a morning person? Most people below the age of 30 would say so. But, in this collaboration with Harvard Medical School, I tested whether or not college students do in fact learn and process information worse in the morning. Remarkably,I found that the morning is actually the best time to learn the labels of new objects, especially when we have to go beyond what we learned, and generalize it to new scenarios.
When is the best time to learn?

Publications

Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.
(2024). Directing attention shapes learning in adults but not children. In Psychological Science.

Paper News Article Talkshow Radio Data/Code

(2024). Memory reactivation during sleep does not act holistically on object memory. In Journal of Neuroscience.

Paper News Article

(2024). Object feature memory is distorted by category structure. Accepted to Open Mind.

Paper Data/Code

(2023). Building integrated representations through interleaved learning. In Journal of Experimental Psychology General.

Paper Data/Code

(2022). The impact of emissions from an essential oil diffuser on cognitive performance. In Indoor Air.

Paper

(2021). Examining the effects of time of day and sleep on generalization. In PLoS ONE.

Paper Data

(2020). Distributed representations for human inference. In Cog Sci.

Paper

(2020). Indoor CO2 concentrations and cognitive function: A critical review. In Indoor Air.

Paper

Personal Projects

Patterns across video game players in character preferences
As a personal project, I extracted player data from a public API of a popular video game to explore player preferences in what kinds of characters they like to play. Analysis code and visualizations can be found here.
Patterns across video game players in character preferences
My brain in the palm of my hand
3D printed by transforming a MRI scan of my brain into a printable model using my labmate’s code. Painted by me. Not actual brain’s size.
My brain in the palm of my hand