After a PhD on how we remember and forget, I moved into customer experience research at a school network. Here is what the work actually looks like, and the skills behind it.

Can we choose to forget something that surprises us? Across five experiments, a scene was hard to forget on purpose only when the surprise broke the meaning of the whole scene, not when it just looked unusual.

Have you ever updated a password, then caught yourself typing the old one on autopilot? Intentionally forgetting outdated information can be helpful and makes our memory system more efficient. This project explores when we actively try to clear our minds, whether certain types of information are inherently easier to forget than others.

Eye-tracking is a powerful tool for measuring memory because eye movements are closely linked to hippocampal activity and can reflect episodic retrieval in real time, often before a person makes an explicit choice. In this project, my colleagues and I used preferential viewing to show that intentional forgetting leaves a different signature than simply having a weak memory.

Most of our memory involves connection-making: linking a face to a name, a person to a place, or an object to the moment you last saw it. In this project, we tested how well people form those links and whether variations in schizotypy traits relate to that ability.

Placeholder description for this teaching project.