Graduate Students
Erinda MorinaWhile completing her bachelor’s and master’s in Public Health from University of Medicine Tirana in Albania, Erinda became especially interested in mental health research, and as a result she decided to move to the United States and pursue a B.S. degree in Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. During this time, Erinda worked with Dr. Vivian Ciaramitaro focusing on cross-modal studies, investigating the processing of visual and auditory information and interactions between these senses at a behavioral and neural level in the context of perceiving emotions. As a senior working on her honors project, she was mainly investigating the effects of social anxiety on the perception of emotional stimuli. Erinda is now a graduate student in the Baby Lab working with Dr. Ciaramitaro, and has been studying cognitive biases in emotional perception in children, combining techniques from psychophysics and electroencephalography.
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Yibiao (Bill) LiangBill received his master’s degree in developmental psychology. During his master’s degree he studied children’s deception, including its development and its relation with executive function, theory of mind, creativity and other factors. He also studied about deception in adults such as the relation between neural reward systems. He used both behavioral experiments and cognitive neuroscience methods --mainly fNIRS in his studies. He is interested in learning children’s low-level cognitive processes such as working memory and attention. He is currently working with Dr. Blaser and Dr. Kaldy on infants and children’s visual working memory and attention.
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Shibo CaoShibo received his bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Boston University in 2019. During his undergraduate studies, he took part in research examining individuals’ ability to adapt to change of visual information dynamically using both eye-tracking and psychophysical method.Upon graduation, he worked as a research assistant in McLean Hospital where he studied non-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease in animal models using behavioral and immunohistochemical techniques. Having exposure to both human & animal research, he is interested in studying various cognitive processes from a developmental perspective. He is working with Dr.Ciaramitaro by examining attention and multisensory processing from different levels using techniques including psychophysics and EEG.
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Jamie Donenfeld (nee Beshore)During Jamie's undergraduate studies in engineering, she took part in several research projects, ranging in discipline from physical science to psychology. After these research experiences and several elective courses in psychology, she decided that the questions she is most interested in asking are best explored using research methods in psychology. Jamie obtained a master’s degree in psychology and is currently investigating cognitive development using methods such as eye tracking and pupillometry. Jamie has been working with Dr. Kaldy and Dr. Blaser.
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Quinn PhamQuinn received her bachelor's degree in Cognitive Science and International Relations from Tufts University in 2021. As part of her senior thesis, she studied user interaction with visualizers of large-scale data. In 2022, she graduated from Boston University with a master's degree in Psychology. During this time, she worked on an eye tracking experiment examining spontaneous eye gaze in a spatial prediction task. Quinn is interested in developmental processes such as Theory of Mind and planning or problem solving. She is working with Dr. Blankenship studying episodic future thinking in tandem with executive functions such as working memory and inhibitory control.
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Candice KoolhaasCandice received her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a concentration in cognitive neuroscience at Eastern Connecticut State University in 2023. As an undergraduate, she worked in a visual cognition lab studying visual search and attention as well as an evolutionary psychology lab, where she worked on projects involving evolutionary theories of mating behavior using pupillometry. Candice’s background as an early childhood educator combines with her interest in cognitive development in her current position working with Dr. Kaldy, where she studies working memory and cognitive effort in early childhood.
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