Research Interests

Emotion and Cognition, Face Perception, Visual Working Memory, Cognitive Control

• If you’re a psychology major student, you would have probably been asked if you could guess what other people’s thinking when you told that you’re studying psychology. (I know, right?) And perhaps you’ve also experienced how studying psychology is a bit different from what you expected before you decided to major in it. You would have heard countless times in an Introduction to Psychology course how psychology is aimed to study human’s mind and behavior in the most scientific way. But once you’ve learned and accepted the fact, you would have again found psychology intriguing and fascinating. What I love about psychology is that it uses the most scientific and sophisticated tools to answer questions closely related to our daily lives. What I am currently working on in Human Performance lab is how emotion influences cognition. Emotion! Did you ever have that thought that your life would have been much easier if you had less of it? You would always make logical decisions, you don’t have to be anxious on your exam days, and you’ll be the coolest person in relationships instead of making unnecessary dramas. But you might have also thought that being able to laugh in joy and shed tears of sorrow makes our lives more lively and colorful. So I want a better understanding of it. I want to know how emotion affects attention, memory, and cognitive control. Does it make impairment in our ability to control for thoughts and behaviors that are unrelated to current goals, or does it help us memorize and attend to things that are considered emotionally significant?

Education

2021.8 - Ph.D., Korea University

M.S., Cognitive Psychology, Korea University

B.S. Psychology, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. GPA: 4.0/4.0 Class of 2014

Positions

2014.1 ~ 2015.3 - Research Assistant in Dr. Yuhong Jiang’s Attention, Memory, and Cognition Lab

• Considerable research experience on visual working memory, visual statistical learning and reward learning
• Conducted projects on visual working memory of faces and scenes
• Participated as a secondary experimenter in a study conducted to examine spatial reference frame of attention in a large outdoor environment
• Participated in an experiment studying the visual working memory in children with high-functioning autism

2014.9 ~ 2014.12 - Research Assistant in Dr. Wilma Koutstaal’s lab

• Participated in a project which examined the influence of convergent and divergent thinking on problem solving and reasoning