Current Members

Mary is a seventh-year doctoral student in the Cognition and Language Laboratory and is currently interested in the role of discrete emotion (e.g., fear, anger, disgust) on language processing, including attentional biases and memory for word stimuli. Specifically, she is interested in the timecourse of discrete effects, especially in relation to other well-established emotion variables such as valence and arousal. Mary is also interested in the survival processing advantage in memory as it relates to individual differences in creativity and divergent thinking, as well as working memory capacity. In more applied settings, Mary has contributed to research on health disparities resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly for Limited English Proficiency (LEP) individuals, and the impact that induced emotion has on ethical decision-making, such as the kind made in jury deliberations. Overall, she is interested in how aspects of our cognition may be adaptive, and what this means for memory, perception, reasoning, and the complex functioning that we enjoy today.

Sarah is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Cognition and Language Laboratory and is currently interested in language acquisition, survival processing, and word type. Specifically, how survival processing and language acquisition allows for the retention and better performance. Her research also focuses recall and word type effects on intentional/incidental learning strategies. Several of her projects have been presented in conferences, including Association of Psychological Science and Psychonomic Society. Sarah has also co-authored entries covering topics such as arousal, gossip and indirect reciprocity, and various mate poaching topics in peer-reviewed encyclopedias. In whole, Sarah is interested in how we, as humans, process words and how those processes differ among language acquisition and individual differences.

Bailey is a third-year doctoral student in the Cognition and Language Laboratory. Her research focuses on traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). She is especially interested in those experienced by athletes and understanding how brain injuries and stress interact to influence the brain's ability to adapt to complex cognitive demands. Bailey has completed previous research on the effects of TBIs on lexical-semantic processing and internalizing symptoms with a particular interest in the cognitive and psychological consequences of sports-related injuries. Recently, her research has expanded to investigate how modern-day stressors and survival processing influence memory. Moving forward, Bailey's research will continue to investigate the short- and long-term effects of stress and brain injuries on cognitive functioning and language processing.  

Mauricio is a second-year doctoral student in the Cognition and Language Laboratory. Mauricio is interested in how the popular logic game found in newspapers, Sudoku, can enhance several cognitive domains, including working memory and attention. Currently, his research is split into two main groups. The first is on how to manipulate Sudoku variants to determine the most optimal Sudoku playing routine for gaining the most cognitive benefits. The second realm dives into determining how to most accurately rate the difficulty levels of any given Sudoku puzzle, rather than relying on generic labels from publishers (e.g., easy, medium, hard). All in all, Mauricio is intrigued by how to best enhance human cognition by means of puzzles.