Profiles

Research Interests

My program of research examines various ways in which research in cognitive psychology can be applied to benefit education, focusing on learning and memory. Specifically, I'm interested in learning strategies and effective instructional designs.

My postdoctoral research at the University of Waterloo is threefold: 1) examine how characteristics of online lectures influence students' affect, mind wandering, metacognition, and learning; 2) examine strategies to maximize the benefits of the production effect (i.e., reading information aloud results in better learning and memory than does reading information silently) in educational settings; and 3) examine how to leverage current advances in artificial intelligence to benefit both research and education.

Research Interests

My program of research examines emotions and emotion regulation among youth. Examining emotions among youth is complicated by the presence of multiple, co-occurring processes reflecting long-term change (e.g., developmental processes) and short-term variability (e.g., day-to-day variability). To accommodate this complexity, my research aims to characterize emotions in the daily lives of youth and the implications for health and well-being by employing longitudinal designs and advanced statistical analyses.

As an AMTD postdoctoral fellow, I am examining affective adaptation during the transition to university. Through the information that emotions provide, we can better understand how students adapt during this critical juncture. At present, our understanding of students’ adaptation is represented by static, often cross-sectional approaches that do not capture the dynamic nature of this transitional period, thus limiting our understanding of how this process unfolds in daily life, what resources may facilitate adaptation, and implications for student health, well-being, and academic retention. Findings from this research can inform programs and policies to better support students' adaptation to university life and holds the potential to disrupt historical patterns of inequities evident in higher education.

Research Interests

As a cognitive scientist specializing in personality, stress, and health psychology, my doctoral work focused on understanding how personality traits and coping with stress impact an individual’s health and well-being. This interdisciplinary background has enabled me to bring a unique perspective to my research. My postdoctoral research focuses on examining the psychological and neural correlates of boredom. As a multifaceted state, boredom influences our internal and external behaviors and responses to the world. What happens to us when we get bored, behaviorally, and what effects does it have on our brain?

As an uncomfortable sensation of wanting, but being unable to engage in some meaningful action, boredom has detrimental effects on an individual’s physical and mental health. Examining the role played by social and environmental factors will help develop an in-depth understanding of the nature of this complex state, its triggers, and effects on the individual and society.

Research Interests

I investigate how learners seek to figure out the world around them by taking actions and considering possibilities. My research examines how children (and adults) learn and reason about causal systems and how learners make decisions during exploration. By integrating cognitive development with ideas from philosophy and computational modeling, I aim to better understand the spontaneous (and sometimes puzzling) behavior of human learners."

Research Interests

My research program studies the moment-to-moment ebbs and flows and fluctuations in cognitive processes over time to better understand the temporal dynamics of human cognition. By bridging together behavioural, psychophysiological, computational, and neuroimaging methods, I have studied temporal dynamics within attentional processes to uncover aspects of internal attention, social attention, and embedded attention. Over the years, my work has revealed that seemingly random variations in attentional patterns over time are in fact quite predictable and highly specific to each individual, advancing our fundamental understanding of the intrinsic and internal regularities that govern individual behaviour.

Research Interests

For many years, my research has been focused on basic human values as they appear across nations. More recently, I got interested in perceptions of older adults and lay theories of wisdom, both in a cross-cultural perspective. Simultaneously, I pursue a track of methodological research. In particular, I investigated a complex role of ipsatization and effects of accounting for measurement error in the values research. I contributed to to the measurement invariance methods, including invariance of the second-order factors and latent classes. Currently I am developing an R package featuring a method for identifying clusters of invariant groups in a network-like representation.