Meet the team
Dr. Stephen Mitroff
Principal Investigator Steve Mitroff is the lab director. He received his B.A. from UC Berkeley in 1998 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2002. After a postdoc position at Yale, he spent 10 years as a faculty member at Duke. He joined the Psychology department at GW in 2015. (CV) |
Dr. Audrey Siqi-Liu
Postdoctoral Fellow Audrey received her B.A. from Claremont McKenna College and her Ph.D. from Duke University in 2023. She is interested in how people produce goal-oriented, adaptive behaviors when completing multi-faceted tasks that often require attentional focus. Her current research involves employing big data approaches and computational methods, including machine learning algorithms and statistical models, to answer questions about visual attention, search strategies, and the effect of task training. |
Dr. Melanie Bancilhon
Postdoctoral Fellow, Army Research Laboratory Melanie received her B.A from Smith College and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 2023. Her research is at the intersection of human-computer interaction, data visualization and human-AI collaboration. Her current research involves understanding how individual differences impact AI-assisted decision-making across various tasks. |
Emma Siritzky
Ph.D. Student Emma is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Cognitive Neuroscience program. She received her undergraduate degree in 2020 from Elon University, where she majored in Psychology. She is interested in how individual differences and prior experience influence visual attention, associative memory, and related learning mechanisms. Emma is currently using big data to study the effects of task relevance and stimulus prevalence on associative learning in visual search. |
Sarah Malykke
Ph.D. Student Sarah is a third-year graduate student in the Cognitive Neuroscience program. She is interested in the cognitive adaptive processes involved in error monitoring and the subsequent impact of these processes on performance. Her current research employs novel response measures to distinguish between strategic and non-strategic adjustments following errors in task performance. |
Justin Grady
Ph.D. Student Justin is a second-year graduate student in the Cognitive Neuroscience program. He is uses data from the lab to explore the relationship between fatigue, visual search, and conscientiousness. Justin is also exploring models of human behavior and how they can be informed by large data. Justin is looking at individual differences in cognitive performance that have academic and applied implications. |
Sarah Hodgdon
Undergraduate Researcher Sarah is a senior undergraduate student in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences Honor Psychology program. She is currently pursuing a BA in brain science. Her research over the past two years has focused on visualization with a targeted concentration on a condition known as Aphantasia, the inability to form mental images. |
Maggie Dochnal
Undergraduate Researcher Maggie is a third-year undergraduate student in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. She is currently pursuing a double major in cognitive neuroscience and psychology along with a minor in biology. Her research focuses on using mouse-tracking to study post-error adjustments in visual search. |
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