Research

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.

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.

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.