About

I’m a PhD student in Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience at Texas A&M University, working in the Learning and Attention Lab with Dr. Brian Anderson.

My research investigates how statistical regularities in the environment shape visual attention. I’m particularly interested in how these dynamics play out in naturalistic, real-world scenes. My work draws on behavioral experiments, eye-tracking, and computational approaches (e.g., saliency modeling) to understand how experience guides where we look and what we suppress.

Current projects span:

• How object–location regularities are acquired and guide search in real-world scenes
• Whether exploration facilitates context-dependent distractor suppression
• How reward history modulates attentional guidance in naturalistic environments
• How prior drinking experience shapes object–location learning in alcohol-related scenes
• Attentional capture by fire stimuli in captive primates with no fire exposure

Before Texas A&M, I completed my B.A. in Psychology (Minor: Anthropology) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where I worked in the VAMP Lab (PI: Michael Dodd) on projects spanning attention, working memory, emotion processing, and EEG methods.

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