Principal Investigator
Brian Anderson
email: brian (dot) anderson (at) tamu (dot) edu
Brian is Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University. He also currently serves as the 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
Laurent Gregoire
[Google Scholar]
Laurent received his PhD from the University of Burgundy in 2013, studying under Pierre Perruchet, and has completed post-docs at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivieres with the CogNAC research group, and Louisiana State University with Steven Greening. Laurent has conducted studies of automaticity, fear conditioning, and emotion-cognition interactions using psychophysics, aversive conditioning, electrodermal activity, EEG, and fMRI methods. He is interested in the relationship between aversive conditioning and reward learning in the control of attention.
Brad Stilwell
[website]
Brad received his PhD from the University of Iowa in 2020, studying under Shaun Vecera, and completed a prior postdoc at Binghamton University with Nicholas Gaspelin. Prior to that, he completed his Masters degree at Villanova University under the mentorship of Chip Folk. Brad’s research focuses on mechanisms of learning-dependent ignoring and how people process information efficiently in the face of potential distraction.
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 has recently finished her 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.
Laboratory Manager
Nusrat (Progga) Jahan
Progga comes to the lab from the University of Texas at Arlington, where she gained experience in cognition and health research in the labs of Daniel Levine and Philip Baiden respectively. She is interested in how emotion affects cognition and what that tell us about the addictive brain. She is particularly interested in comorbid and co-occurring mood and substance-use disorders and how they affect cognitive functioning (specifically attention, decision making, and reward processing).
Masters Students
Sangji (David) Lee
David is a first-year student in the Masters of Public Health (MPH) program at Texas A&M University, and has been an active member of the lab since he was a freshman at the undergraduate level. His research investigates the relationship between selection history and the choice of voluntary attentional control settings, and he is also interested in how the control of attention is modulated by effort. His long-term goals are to translate principles of experience-dependent attention and information processing into the domain of public health. David was mentored by Andy Kim (see lab alumni) and now works directly with Dr. Anderson.
Post-baccalaureate Researchers
Molly McKinney
Molly joins the lab from Ohio State University, where she served as lab manager for the Cognitive Control Laboratory of Andrew Leber. Her research focuses on how the control of attention is shaped by learning tied to the exertion of physical effort, and her work is supported by a fellowship from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Independent Study Undergraduates
Felicity Woodson
Felicity’s independent study investigates whether emotion-induced blindness (EIB) is modulated by the pharmacological blunting of evaluative processing associated with acetaminophen administration. Felicity works closely with Ming-Ray Liao (see lab alumni).
Emily Glynn
Emily’s independent study investigates the relationship between alcohol abuse and emotion-induced blindness (EIB). Emily works closely with Sojung Youn.
Jenna Glotfelty
Jenna’s independent study examines how effort-induced arousal affects multiple indicators of attentional control. An additional collaborative study investigates the influence of caffeine on the control of attention. She works closely with Ming-Ray Liao (see lab alumni), Sojung Youn, and Brad Stilwell.
Jonathan Reagan
Jonathan’s independent study investigates how the provision of task cues informing participants of an optimal strategy influences strategic attentional control in the future. He works closely with Andrew Clement (see lab alumni).
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Anna Baranski, Angelina Nguyen, Angelina Ochoa, Barbara Serna Acuna, Bo Kim, Elira Martin, Emily Glynn, Hayden Tolley, Jenna Glotfelty, Jenna McCorvy, Jose Luis Heraud Rouillon, Karley Egger, Leyla Ochoa, Luke Rodriguez, Mika Lal, Nathan Joseph, Richard Jiang, Sanaa Stough-Lacking, Shreya Lakshman, Simone Bergeron, Thomas Topping, Trini Ferrante, William Secrest, Vanessa Aguirre
Lab Alumni (and position upon leaving the lab)
Postdocs
- Andrew Clement, Assistant Professor, Millsaps College
PhD Students
- Ming-Ray Liao, Statistician with the United States Census Bureau
- Haena (Hannah) Kim, Postdoc with Dr. Yuan Chang Leong, University of Chicago
- Namgyun Kim, Assistant Professor, University of Dayton
- Jeesu (Andy) Kim, Postdoc with Dr. Mara Mather, University of Southern California
Lab Managers
- Lana Mrkonja, Masters program in Clinical Psychology, University of Amsterdam
- Mark Britton, PhD program in Clinical Psychology, University of Florida
Post-baccalaureate
- James Grindell, Developer for ALCAL Industries Inc.
Undergraduate Thesis and Independent Project Students
- Rebecca Warren, NIH PhD PREP Program, University of Notre Dame
- Haris Khan
- Alex Ogden, Masters of Finance Program, University of Houston
- David Lee, Masters of Public Health (MPH) program, Texas A&M University (with us!!)