Jade Carriero

Hello, my name is Jade Carriero and I am currently a junior psychology major at WCSU! This is my third semester in the Vision and Cognition Lab and I am excited to continue to be part of this amazing team!. I decided to join the lab after taking Dr. Gee's Brain and Behavior Course in my first year. I look forward to gaining research and lab experience to prepare me for graduate school.

Sara Azzi

Hello! My name is Sara Azzi and I am a sophomore psychology major at WCSU. This is my second semester being a member of the Vision and Cognition Lab. My passion for psychological research began after taking Dr. Gustafson's Experimental Psychology course last semester. I am so excited to be a member of this amazing team and gain valuable research experience as an undergraduate student!

Skylar Bartush

Hello, my name is Skylar Bartush and I’ve been a member of the Vision and Cognition Lab since May 2022. My interest in biological psychology and cognition evolved from taking Dr. Gee‘s Brain and Behavior course two years ago and Dr. Gustafson‘s Cognitive Psychology course. I developed a desire to pursue research from various experiences in my undergraduate including attending the EPA conference last March. I am so excited to expand upon my research skills and interests in my remaining time here at WCSU. After graduation, I plan to continue my work as a research assistant outside of WCSU and eventually apply for Ph.D. programs!

Margaridha Ribeiro

Hello, my name is Margaridha Ribeiro! I am currently a senior psychology major at WCSU. This is my first semester in the Vision and Cognition Lab. I’m very interested in experimental psychology and joining the team has only heightened my passion for research. 

I'm excited to gain lab and research experience so that I'm able to learn firsthand how research is conducted and be involved in the process of contributing to the field of psychology! This experience will also help me tremendously in preparing for graduate school. I'm ecstatic to be apart of the team!

Ashley Green

Hello, my name is Ashley Green! I’m currently a senior psychology major here at WCSU. This is my fourth semester in the lab! Taking Brain and Behavior with Dr. Gee sparked my interests in neuroscience and biology. I’m excited to be exploring research! I look forward to gaining lab experience in preparation for grad school and to expand my career focuses.  

As a research assistant, my current work with Dr. Gee involves studying spatial reasoning to understand how people think about their environment and the objects they interact with.

Jala Cooke

Hello, my name is Jala Cooke! I am a junior psychology major at WCSU! This is my first semester working in the Vision and Cognition Laboratory. Although I wish to pursue a career involving children, I joined the team after taking Dr. Gee's Brain and Behavior course. I immediately became fascinated with the neuroscience behind behaviors and I knew the lab would be a good fit for me! The experiences that I will receive working in the lab will not only prepare me for graduate school but will prepare me for possible future research in the psychology field! I am extremely excited to be a part of such a wonderful team!

Mikhaela McFarlin

Hello, my name is Mikhaela McFarlin and I am currently a senior psychology major at WCSU! This will be my second semester working with Dr. Gee in the Vision and Cognition Lab. I decided to join the lab team because I found Dr. Gee's course in Brain and Behavior absolutely intriguing, and I wished to gain more research experience before applying to graduate school. 

While I will be applying to graduate programs based on mental health counseling for those who have suffered trauma, some of my other interests include neuroscience as well as biological psychology. 

Allie DeBruyn

Hello! My name is Allie DeBruyn. I received my first bachelors from WCSU in 2015, but I returned part time in August 2018 to take Dr. Gee’s Intro to Brain & Behavior class. By the end of his class, I knew I needed to return to WCSU full time to pursue what I truly enjoy, and earn a second bachelor's degree in psychology.

I started working for the Vision and Cognition Lab in January 2019 because I wanted to learn more from Dr. Gee, and I wanted to gain real experience in psychological research to prepare myself for graduate school.

I am currently working with Dr. Gee on a project involving mental rotation and paper folding, and how embodied cognition can help with spatial reasoning ability.

Jessie Plouffe

PsyD Student at the University of Hartford 

Hello, my name is Jessie Plouffe and I am currently a senior psychology major at WCSU! I have been working for the Vision and Cognition Laboratory since January 2018. I decided to join the team because I greatly enjoyed my course in Brain and Behavior and also wanted to gain research experience before attending graduate school. While I will be attending a clinical PsyD program in the fall, biological psychology and neuroscience are my secondary interests and I wished to learn more about the subject matter. 

I have been working with Dr. Gee on a project relating eye movements to mental rotation for the past year, and I am super excited to be able to soon publish that manuscript and begin collecting data on a new project this semester!

Madi Mazik

Assistant at New Milford Counseling Center

Hello, I'm Madi Mazik! I'm a senior psychology major in my final semester here at WCSU. My research at the Vision and Cognition Lab focuses on cognitive learning, and how lecture presentation affects students retention of material. I'm excited to be publishing a manuscript with Dr. Gee on this work soon, and to begin a second project on mental rotation! 

After taking brain and behavior, I knew my main interests in psychology were neuroscience and cognition. This has lead me to pursue a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience with the goal of researching neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's.

Brittney Romagna

Masters Student at NYU Counseling Psychology, 2019 - present

Hello! After learning about the brain circuitry involved in managing stress in Dr. Gee's Brain and Behavior course, I became insatiably interested in the effects of stress on the human body. I examined differences between psychological and physical stressors.

If you're as fascinated by psychology and neuroscience as I am, I would strongly encourage you to become involved in the research of the VC lab! The training that I got at the VC Lab has been truly invaluable. I've been able to learn about professional data collection, become familiarized with visuospatial literature, and ultimately design and conduct my own experiment.

Chelsea Aquino

Chelsea was a psychology major with aspirations of entering the insurance field. With a love of learning and number crunching, her work in the lab involved heavy data collection and analysis. Chelsea’s project helped us understand how our perception of objects changes when viewed from different angles

Piper Darling

Hi, I am a psychology major planning a career in cognitive psychology. My research will be examining how we process information we gather from the environment. I will be

researching the cognitive processes involved during mental rotation tasks. The focus of my investigation will be seeing if different types of manipulations can elicit a certain type of cognitive strategy.

Maura Gissen, MA in Counseling Psychology at the University of Denver

Research Assistant at Rocky Mountain MIRECC for Suicide Prevention - Veterans Health Administration 

Hi! I am a psychology major with the goal of becoming a counselor. Taking a Brain and Behavior course ignited my interest in the connection between our biology and the mind. My research looks at the ability to use mental rotation and spatial relations while restricting eye movements. I look forward to seeing if inhibiting the use of eye movements will have an effect on the time it takes to complete a mental rotation task, and what that might tell us. I am excited to be contributing research to the university and can’t wait to what the semester will bring in the Vision Lab!

Jacob Grossman

Doctoral student at the University of North Texas

Hello. I am a double major in psychology and philosophy. My curiosity for the answers to timeless philosophical questions about subjective perceptual experience has driven me to perform groundbreaking eye movement research. How exactly does cognition influence the movement of our eyes? Are there objective patterns of movement across all human beings, or do different people fixate on different things in order to solve mental rotation tasks? Specifically, my goal is to be able to map out exactly what our eyes are doing while attempting to solve a mental rotation task. When people respond incorrectly to a mental rotation task, their reaction times are significantly longer when compared to their correct responses. Do the movements of our eyes reveal the cognitive processes accounting for this increase in reaction time? My project sets out to decode these movements and discover what our minds are doing while we are attempting to perform these simple spatial reasoning tasks.

Elana Yaghsizian

MA in Counseling and Family Therapy at Central Connecticut State University 

Hi, I am a psychology major. I live in Ridgefield with my husband, David, and our daughter, Anaia. My first interest is psychology, and at some point along the way I fell in love with the physiology and mechanics of the human brain. There is a lot of information that we are constantly processing through our visual system. Did you know that 50% of our cortex is dedicated to visual processing and we move our eyes 10,800 times in one hour!? My project documented the nature of our eye movements when we are interacting with our environment. For example, what types of eye movements are being made in order to quickly and efficiently interact with 3D objects to access their size and shape? The research in this specific area is sparse, so I look forward to sharing our findings with the greater scientific community! 

Sean Congdon 

Hi! I’m glad you are interested in our work here at the WCSU Vision Lab. I am a psychology major preparing for a future in academics and research at the graduate level. My current research examines the cognitive differences in our perception of the world around us dependent upon the presentation of visual stimuli moving around different axes. I believe that perception of how objects appear and move within our visual field differs depending on whether those objects are changing position in relation to a specific axis. From changes in the speed, complexity, and patterns of our eye movements to our ability to correctly identify objects in a timely manner, there are an abundance of differences that are being explored through my research.

Matt Korduner

Matt was a psychology major, and one of the first students to join the lab. He was interested in how past visual experiences influenced spatial reasoning. He examined how practice improves mental rotation performance. He also looked at the effects of video game expertise.