Crossmodal Spatial Attention: Abstract and Proposal
This is the research abstract and proposal for my most recent project, where I examine the crossmodal integration of spatial attention. I received over $5,000 in funding to complete this project, and I am currently working towards its completion.
SNL 2022 Poster—When Music is Language: The Electro-Encephalography of a Speech Surrogate
From the 2022 conference for the Society of the Neurobiology of language. It reflects the preliminary research my advisors and I performed on a visiting practitioner of musical speech surrogacy, where we used electroencephalography to analyze whether verbally spoken language is processed in a manner equivalent to musical speech surrogacy.
Musical Speech Surrogacy, Liminal Language, and Incidental Modalities
Research paper reviewing the (lack of ) literature on the cognition underlying the production and perception of instrumental speech surrogacy, the practice where language is translated into pitch, rhythm, and timbre and communicated on an instrument. Suggests the expansion of the literature with a novel experiment.
Visual Thalamic Circuitry
This is my final project from computational neuroscience, where I had to create a wikipedia article on a topic of my choosing. I am fascinated by the role of the thalamus within the brain, so I chose to do a deep dive into how that subcortical structure handles incoming visual information from both sensory receptors and regions of the occipital neocortex.
Unmodelling Linguistic Relativity: A Proposal for the Computational Analysis of Gendered Percepts
Final project for COGS 50.03, computational psycholinguistics. Proposes the utilization of machine learning algorithms to investigate how the language an individual speaks influences the content of their thoughts. Predicts that the hypothesis, that a language’s gender plays a significant role in shaping the nature of thought between cultures, will be proven false, and that linguistic relativity is, in reality, a vastly overstated phenomenon.
Draft: Research Proposal for the Study of Instrumental Surrogacy Cognition
Working draft proposal for research into the cognition of instrumental surrogacy. The project will use electroencephalography to compare the cognition underlying the processing of verbal speech and instrumental speech. In particular, EEG methodology allows for not only the collection of data pertaining to the lateral localization of the modes’ processing in the brain, but additionally, analysis of the N400 event-related potential response allows for investigation into how these disparate streams are consolidated into one shared mechanism for semantic understanding.
Combinatorial Cognition: The Brain’s Approach to Language
Research paper for PHIL 25 suggesting for a novel approach to how the mind manages its mental faculties, combining computational, connectionist, and embodied philosophy into a holistic theory on how the brain processing and wields language.
Lab Report: Bayesian Classification of Moral Content
This is a write-up of a lab my group and I did for Computational Psycholinguistics, where we attempted to use Bayesian models to parse the subjective morality of different statements. With disappointingly small data sets, we were only able to muster a paltry accuracy, demonstrating the necessity of big data to derive meaningful results from such a process.
Antisocial Social Predictions: Neurodivergency and Stress’ Effects on Mental State Transition Predictions
This was the final project for one of my cognitive science seminar classes, where my partner and I researched how mental state and emotion affects the thought patterns of both neurodivergent (specifically autistic) and neurotypical subjects. Finding that Autistic individuals’ reported thoughts are generally less correlated to their emotional state as their neurotypical peers, we proposed a future study to probe the same effect in those with Antisocial Personality Disorder, to test if this lack of correlation applies to not just those with difficulty processing their emotional states, but those who have no ability to process emotion whatsoever.
The Chinese Room
A short paper I wrote for the philosophy of cognitive science analyzing the classic thought experiment of “The Chinese Room”. I end up taking issue with the original formulation, due to the fact that the description of the Chinese Room and its mechanisms does not fall in line with the brain’s true cognitive architecture.
A Multi-Framework Analysis of the Georgian Language With Distributed and Paradigm Function Morphology
My final project from LING 26, Morphology. This paper analyzes Georgian, a language from the Caucasuses region spoken by the Georgian people. As a Non-Proto-Indo-European language, my partner and I felt that it would be interesting and fun to examine. We were correct in this, finding that two typical methods of analyzing morphology, Paradigm Function and Distributed, did not provide adequate means to fully explain the complexities of the dialect we explored.
The Shape of Option Spaces to Come
Short paper addressing recent work on the brain’s capacity for option generation, suggesting potential directions for future research.