As a Masters student, I am working with Drs. Buetti and Lleras in the Vision Lab. As a member of the lab, I am exploring three areas of research that focus on how people see the world.

My first research interest is on understanding aspects of visual search. Specifically, I am studying how people visually search for targets in a scene, how the visual search process is influenced by distractors in the environment (such as the number of distractors in the scene, and the similarity of distractors to the target). I am also studying how people’s visual search efficiency is related to other aspect of visual ability, such as visual working memory.

My second area of interest concerns the influence of culture on time perception Specifically, I am studying how culture influences people’s perceived duration of emotional events. Importantly, in this research we also manipulate individuals’ sense of control over the events they see in the experiments.

Finally, I am interested in the phenomenon of mind wandering as a failure of concentration. Specifically, I am interested in studying whether mind wandering plays a role in regulating emotion and arousal.