Masters of Arts Thesis Program
It is expected that the Master of Arts (MA) thesis will be completed within the first two years in the program. The Master's degree will normally be required before studies for the doctorate begin.
Examples of Master's thesis research topics in Cognitive Neuroscience:
- The Self-Reference Effect in the Visual and Auditory Modalities: Effects of Referent and Valence on Memory Performance. Alexandra Anacleto, 2025
- Cued by music: Eliciting autobiographical memories across the lifespan and assessing their emotionality. Khalil Hussein, 2025
- Semantic Relatedness or Arousal: What drives the Emotional Enhancement in Memory? Brian Kim, 2025
- Neural responses to facial expressions: A story of arousal and valence? Amie Durston, 2024
- Cognitive homeostasis: Boredom as a drive for optimal engagement. Chantal Trudel, 2024
- Assessing the association between the error-related ERPs and trait anxiety using mass univariate statistics. Zelin Chen, 2023
- Long-Term Consequences of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in Younger Adults on Cognitive Performance and Emotional Regulation: Comparisons with Older Adults. Adam Cox, 2023
- Probability Antimatching. Peter Diberardino, 2023
- An Investigation into the Self-Deployment of Attentional Reminders. Zion Leatham, 2023
- Capturing Dynamic Fluctuations in Remembered Momentary Attentional States. Samantha Ayers-Glassey, 2022
- Updating Local and Global Probability Events During Maze Navigation. Sixuan Chen, 2022
- Examining the relation between boredom and creativity. Jamie Nettinga, 2022
- Perception of Probabilities which are Subject to Change. Julia Schirmeister, 2022
- The Influence of Gender and Sexual Prejudice on Empathic Responding. Seth Winward, 2022
- Enhancing Memory using Enactment: Does Meaning Matter when Producing or Observing an Action? Yadurshana Sivashankar, 2021
- Drawing as an Encoding Tool: Generalizing to Emotional and More Complex Stimuli. Sophia Tran, 2021
- Investigating the relation between boredom and media multi-tasking. Allison Drody, 2020
- Mental Model Updating and Eye Movements. Hanbin Go, 2020
- Restoration of sustained attention following virtual nature exposure: Undeniable or unreliable? Lydia Hicks, 2020
- On the relation between mind-wandering, ADHD, engagingness, and effort. Austin Hurst, 2020
- Contrasting mind-wandering, (dark) flow, and affect during slot machine play and an auditory vigilance task: Implications for gambling to escape. Tyler Kruger, 2020
- Does posture influence the Stroop effect. Emilie Caron, 2019
- Probabilistic Adaptation and Voluntary Attention. Sean Griffin, 2019
- Re-evaluating Whether Bilateral Eye Movements Influence Memory Retrieval. Brady Roberts, 2019
- Loading . . . Loading . . . The influence of download time on information search. Alyssa Smith, 2019
- Effects of auditory context on face expression processing: an ERP investigation. Anna Hudson, 2018
- Memory Bias for Threat-related Information in Social Anxiety. Ryan Yeung, 2018
- Negative Encoding Contexts Create a Downstream Memory Advantage for Foils. Christopher Lee, 2017
- The relation between smartphone use and everyday inattention. Jeremy Marty-Dugas, 2017
- The time-course of contextual valence and self-relevance effects on the perception of faces with direct versus averted gaze. Sarah McCrackin, 2017
- An eye (region) sensitivity during early face perception: the N170 is modulated by facial context and featural fixation. Karisa Parkington, 2017
- Beyond the emotional impact of dissonance: Inharmonic music elicits greater cognitive interference than does harmonic music. Tanor Bonin, 2016
- Foraging in internal and external environments: developing experimental assays for boredom proneness. Jhotisha Mugon, 2016
- The influence of spatial regularities in statistical and sequence learning. Alexander Filipowicz, 2015
- Interfering with episodic memory for words and pictures to uncover their representational codes. Melissa Meade, 2015
- Exploring the relationship between self-regulation and boredom. Andriy Struk, 2015
Doctoral Program Dissertations
The main component of the doctoral program is the dissertation. Students are usually assigned to a specific research supervisor when they are admitted to the program based on interests and background. Any of the core or cross-appointed faculty listed on the faculty page can serve as supervisors for the doctoral program. In addition, the adjunct appointees to the department are also occasionally willing to supervise our doctoral students. Completion of the Doctoral dissertation typically requires another three years after completing the MA.
Examples of dissertation research topics in Cognitive Neuroscience:
- Boredom and the sense of agency. Baaba Dadzie, 2025
- Towards a Holistic Understanding of the Drivers of Media Multitasking. Allison Drody, 2025
- Boredom as a Motivator of Pain Infliction in Psychopathy. Jessica Lee, 2025
- Holistic face processing across neural and behavioral measures. James Siklos-Whillans, 2025
- Examining the Relation Between Oral Contraceptive Use and Attention-Related Traits and States. Alyssa Smith, 2024
- Examining the Influence of Caffeine on Attentional Engagement in Everyday Life and During an Auditory Attention Task. Tyler Kruger, 2024
- Intentional Forgetting: The Role of Retrieval in Encoding. Pelin Tan, 2024
- Empirical Adequacy of Ranking Theory: A Behavioural and Theoretical Investigation of Human Uncertainty Representation. Hanbin Go, 2024
- On Memory for Everyday Symbols. Brady Roberts, 2023
- The Persistence of Involuntary Memory: Analyzing Phenomenology, Links to Mental Health, and Content. Ryan Yeung, 2022
- Examining the neural, behavioural, and social responses associated with affective self-referential processing in adults and children. Anna Hudson, 2022
- Individual differences in recogn-eye-zing faces: Behavioural and neural underpinnings of face recognition in neurotypical and autistic adults. Karisa Parkington, 2021
- Perceiving direct and averted gaze during emotion discrimination, affective empathy and affective theory of mind judgements: electrophysiological and behavioural effects. Sarah McCrackin, 2020
- Context reinstatement reconsidered: Investigating boundary conditions of the effect. Christopher Lee, 2020
- Refining flow: The re-conceptualization and measurement of flow as deep effortless concentration. Jeremy Marty-Dugas, 2020
- The benefits and boundary conditions of drawing on episodic memory. Melissa Meade, 2019
- An exploration of the causes and correlates of boredom. Jhotisha Mugon, 2019
- The desire to act: Exploring situational, dispositional and genetic correlates of a fundamental motivational state. Andriy Struk, 2019
- The Perceptual Mechanisms of Probability Effects. Syaheed Jabar, 2018
- Media Multitasking and Performance on Attentionally-Demanding Tasks. Brandon Ralph, 2017
- Emotions and the Environment: The Variable Effect of Environmental Complexity on Pleasure and Interest. Vedran Dzebic, 2017
- Adapting to Change: The Role of Priors, Surprise and Brain Damage on Mental Model Updating. Alex Filipowicz, 2017
- On the mnemonic benefits of drawing. Jeffrey Wammes, 2017
- The Interdependence of Attention, Memory, and Performance Based Reward. Christie Haskell, 2016
- How Reading Difficulty Influences Mind-wandering: The Theoretical Importance of Measuring Interest. Noah Forrin, 2016
- Neural processing of fearful and happy facial expressions: effects of fixation to facial features and task demands. Karly Neath, 2015
- On the Theoretical Importance of Distinguishing Between Intentional and Unintentional Types of Mind Wandering. Paul Seli, 2015