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

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 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

Karley Egger
Karley is a Psychology major with a Neuroscience minor and an Applied Behavioral Health Certificate from Houston, Texas. She joined the Anderson Learning and Attention Lab in Spring 2022 because of her interest in how addiction and mental health disorders influence the control of attention and decision-making. She plans to start up an independent study on caffeine’s influence on state anxiety and how that affects motivational factors during sensory information processing. Karley is our first undergraduate lab manager and serves in this capacity while finishing up her degree at Texas A&M University and preparing to apply for Clinical PhD programs.

 

Independent Study Undergraduates

William Secrest
Will’s independent study examines how learned associations between stimulus features and emotional valence influence the control of attention, specifically in the context of signal suppression. Will’s project is mentored by Brad Stilwell.

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

Anna Baranski, Angelina Nguyen, Angelina Ochoa, Barbara Serna Acuna, Ben Stricker, Daniela Gomez Pedroso Soto, Eden Barr, Evelyn Bonner, Elise Mahler, Hayden Tolley, Jose Luis Heraud Rouillon, Justin Paulder, Karley Egger, Leyla Ochoa, Liliana Hepburn, Lindsey Seale, Mika Lal, Richard Jiang, Sanaa Stough-Lacking, Shivam Pancholy, Thomas Topping, Trini Ferrante, William Secrest, Vanessa Aguirre, Venkata Yalamanchili

 

Lab Alumni (and position upon leaving the lab)

Postdocs

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

  • Nusrat (Progga) Jahan, PhD program in Cognitive Neuroscience, Ohio State University
  • Lana Mrkonja, Masters 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
  • 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