Learning & Attention Lab

Texas A&M University

People

Principal Investigator

Brian Anderson
email: brian (dot) anderson (at) tamu (dot) edu

Brian is Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences and holds the Charles Puryear Professorship in Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. He also serves as the founding Director of the Human Imaging Facility. He received a B.A. in Social Science from the University of Maine at Augusta, an M.S. in Psychology from Villanova University where he studied under Charles Folk, and a Ph.D. in Psychological & Brain Sciences from Johns Hopkins University where he studied under the late Steven Yantis. His research has been recognized with the Steven Yantis Early Career Award from the Psychonomic Society, the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the area of Perception and Motor Performance from the American Psychological Association, the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science, and the Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award from the Vision Sciences Society, among other honors. His faculty profile, which includes a link to his CV and Google Scholar profile, can be found [here]. A biography of Brian that was published in American Psychologist can be found [here].

 

Postdocs

Sunghyun Kim
Sunghyun investigates the flexible control of attention, specifically how actions guide spatial selection. His work on ‘response-induced attention’ demonstrates that motor responses can act as internal cues, potentially aiding or disrupting attentional performance. He seeks to uncover how the interplay between action and perception governs human behavior.

 

 

Graduate Students

Niya Yan
Niya started the PhD program in Psychological & Brain Sciences in Spring 2021. She comes to the lab from from Zhejiang University, where she conducted research on attribute amnesia under the mentorship of Hui Chen and completed a master’s thesis on the effect of expectation on attention. She is interested in how top-down factors (e.g., expectation, reward history, emotion) influence visual cognition (e.g., attention, awareness).

Sojung Youn
Sojung joined the PhD program in Psychological & Brain Sciences in Fall 2021. She received her baccalaureate degree from Daegu Catholic University, South Korea and Mississippi State University. Sojung completed a master’s thesis from San Diego State University with Dr. Ksenija Marinkovic. She is interested in attentional control and executive functioning deficits among substance abusers at the neural level and would like to help individuals who are suffering from relapse. 

Justin Frandsen
Justin joined the PhD program in Psychological & Brain Sciences in Fall 2023. He received his baccalaureate degree from the University of Nebraska, where he conducted several independent study projects under the mentorship of Mike Dodd. He is interested in how learning guides attention in naturalistic scenes and in the role of statistical learning in the control of attention more broadly. 

Molly McKinney
Molly completed an NIH postbaccalaureate research fellowship in the lab before joining the PhD program in Psychological & Brain Sciences in 2024. Molly joins us from (“The”) Ohio State University, where she served as lab manager for the Cognitive Control Laboratory of Andrew Leber. Her NIH fellowship focused on how the control of attention is shaped by learning tied to the exertion of physical effort, and her research interests include the strategic control of attention and all things priority computation. 

 

 

Laboratory Manager

Leyla Ochoa
Leyla is a Psychology major with a Neuroscience minor from El Paso, Texas. She joined the Anderson Learning and Attention Lab in Spring 2023, inspired by her interest in how psychiatric disorders influence the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying learning, attention, and behavioral control. 
She intends to pursue medical school, where she hopes to integrate her background in psychology and neuroscience into a career focused on understanding and treating mental health disorders.

 

Independent Study Undergraduates

Richard Jiang
Richard’s independent study examines the relationship between the novelty of distracting information and the degree to which this information is encoded into working memory. Richard’s project is mentored by Niya Yan.

Angelina Ochoa
Angie’s independent study examines the influence of selection history on the unintentional encoding of information into working memory. Angie’s project is mentored by Niya Yan.

 

Undergraduate Research Assistants

Anjalika Sachan, Angelina Nguyen, Anna Gion, Anthony Lendino, Arianna Petty, Andy Pradhan, Ben Stricker, Eden Barr, Jose Luis Heraud Rouillon, Kate Winston, Liliana Hepburn, Madison Davis, Mika Lal, Sabeen Azim, and Skylar Minnitte.

 

Lab Alumni (and position upon leaving the lab)

Postdocs

PhD Students

Lab Managers

  • Karley Gleinig, MA program in Clinical Psychology, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi 
  • Nusrat (Progga) Jahan, PhD program in Cognitive Neuroscience, Ohio State University
  • Lana Mrkonja, PhD program in Clinical Psychology, University of Amsterdam
  • Mark Britton, PhD program in Clinical Psychology, University of Florida

Post-baccalaureate

  • Molly McKinney, PhD program, Texas A&M University (with us!!)
  • James Grindell, Developer for ALCAL Industries Inc.

Undergraduate Thesis and Independent Project Students

  • Emily Glynn, MD program, University of Colorado Anschutz
  • Jonathan Reagan, Teach for America
  • Jenna Glotfelty, Masters program, College of William & Mary
  • Felicity Woodson, Pharmacy technician, HEB
  • Natalie Johnson, MD program, UT Health San Antonio (Long School of Medicine) 
  • Rebecca Warren, PhD program, University of Notre Dame (and NSF GRFP recipient)
  • Haris Khan, supply chain analyst, 2 Z Technology Co.
  • Alex Ogden, Masters of Finance Program, University of Houston
  • Sangji (David) Lee, Masters of Public Health (MPH) program, Texas A&M University (with us!!), then Research Coordinator, Baylor College of Medicine