Research Experience

I am passionate about researching ways to improve learning and memory.

During my undergraduate and master's at the University of Delaware, I worked with Dr. Timothy Vickery on questions related to reinforcement learning and statistical learning.

At University of Massachusetts Amherst, I began working with Dr. Rosie Cowell and Dr. David Huber researching the effectiveness of practice tests. Upon their departure from the university, I began working with Dr. Jeffrey Starns. My dissertation explores the potential benefit of drawing and tracing for visual long-term memory.

Feature Relevance in Reinforcement Learning

I completed an independent senior thesis looking at how varying irrelevant features (color and location) of objects impacts reinforcement learning performance. We found that the location of objects was tracked even when it was irrelevant to performance.

Senior Thesis

Working Memory
& Visual Statistical Learning

Master's Thesis

My master’s thesis explored the role of working memory in visual statistical learning. To explore this, I did a series of three experiments. In these experiments, I found a positive correlation between working memory and visual statistical learning abilities and found that adding additional working memory load impairs visual statistical learning performance.

Testing Effect for Novel, Abstract Objects

First Year Project

During my first year, I completed a series of 13 experiments looking at the testing effect for meaningless visual content. Surprisingly, we found no testing effect for this content which suggests that simply studying visual materials may be more beneficial than practice tests. This work was supported by a Graduate School Predissertation Grant and is currently in press at The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. A preprint is available on OSF.

Music & Small Group Discussions

Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

I had noticed anecdotally that students talked more during small group discussions if I played background music. To formally explore that idea, I did small group discussions with either no background music, lyrical music, or instrumental music. I then surveyed how comfortable the students felt in the discussions. The results showed a marginal benefit of instrumental music.

Drawing & Tracing for Long-Term Memory

Dissertation

My dissertation explored the impact of drawing and tracing on subsequent visual long-term memory.