I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and that you're looking forward to finishing the semester strong as we approach the holiday season. To take your mind off the fact that we are officially in December, please take a minute to read through the last graduate newsletter of the year and learn about the most recent accomplishments of our graduate students.

Publications

• Cash, T. N. & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2024). Assessing metacognitive knowledge in subject decisions: The knowledge of weights paradigm. Thinking and Reasoning, 1-43. https://doi.org/10. 1080/13546783.2024.2426543
• Waller, M., Yurovsky, D., & Nozari, N. (2024). Of Mouses and Mans: A Test of Errorless Versus Error‐Based Learning in Children. Cognitive Science, 48(11), e70006. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70006
• Waller, M., Yurovsky, D., & Nozari, N. (2024). Production training and contextual similarity hurt the comprehension of new vocabulary. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2024.2429127
• Tracy, E. L., Xie, Y., Buysse, D. J., Smagula, S. F., Soehner, A., & Hasler, B. P. (2024). An Exploratory Pilot Study on Social Rhythm Regularity and Its Associations with Sleep, Circadian, Affective, and Alcohol Use Outcomes in Late Adolescents. Journal of Sleep Research, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1111/jsr.14346
• Horner, F.S. & Helgeson, V.S. (in press) Psychosocial predictors of short-term glucose among people with diabetes: A narrative review. Journal of Behavioral Medicine.
• Cash, T. N. & Oppenheimer, D. M. (in press). Generative chatbots ain't experts: Exploring cognitive and metacognitive limitations that hinder expertise in generative chatbots. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.
• Granovetter, M. C., Maallo, A. M. S., Ling, S., Robert, S., Freud, E., Patterson, C., & Behrmann, M. (in press). Functional Resilience of the Neural Visual Recognition System Post-Pediatric Occipitotemporal Resection. iScience.
• Asal Yunusova submitted an article, "Depression trajectories among first year college students" for review to the Journal of American College Health.
• Sophia Robert submitted an article, "Space- and object-based attention in patients with a single hemisphere following childhood resection" for review to Scientific Reports.

Grants and Awards

• Yuxi Xie was awarded the Heritage Dissertation Research Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology ($2000) for her dissertation project title d, "Cyclical Processes Linking Couple Conflicts to Sleep Quality."
• Kaylee Foor submitted an application for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).

Conference Presentations and Talks

• Trent Cash presented a talk titled, "Metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control in subjective, multi-attribute choice" (Coauthor: Danny Oppenheimer) at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society this November.
• Trent Cash presented a poster titled, "Can LLMs tell you when they might be wrong? Evaluating the accuracy of LLMs’ confidence judgments" (Coauthors: Danny Oppenheimer, Sara Christie) at the annual meeting of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making this November.
• Julia Conti presented a poster titled, "Rethinking relations: limitations of pre-training in relational rule learning" (Coauthors: Kenneth Koedinger, Paulo Carvalho) at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society this November.
• Asal Yunusova had her project, "Digital mindfulness training for late adolescents with IBS," selected for presentation as a citation poster at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine in March 2025 in Seattle, WA.
  • Citation posters are chosen on the basis of their high merit.
• Letian Huang had a poster accepted for the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology conference in February 2025 in Denver, CO. 
• Letian Huang had an oral presentation accepted for the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine in March 2025 in Seattle, WA.

Congratulations to everyone for their many achievements this semester. Hope you all have a wonderful holiday season!

First and foremost, a warm welcome to our new cohort of eleven first year students, we are really excited to have you and hope that you are settling into Pittsburgh well. I hope everyone is staying dry and preparing for Fall weather to (finally) arrive.

Before the onset of mid-semester chaos, if it hasn't hit already, please take a moment to read below about our graduate students' most recent accomplishments from July to September and join me in congratulating them.

Paper Submissions

• •  Luthra, S.*, Luor, A.*, Tierney, A.T., Dick, F., & Holt, L.L. (* Equal contribution). Distributional learning drives statistical deafening. BioRxiv. OSF.
  • Kumar, L.,  Creswell, K.G., Lyons, G., Brown, K., & Feeney, B.C. (under review). Alcohol’s effects on emotion recognition and third-person and second-person empathy tasks in heavy-drinking young adults. Scientific Reports.
  • Cantlon, J., Piantadosi, S. , Conti, J., Boni, I., Ozaydin, T., & Bonn, C. ()under review).Universal foundation and plasticity of abstract reasoning across culture, age, and species.  Nature Communications.

Grants and Awards

• Asal Yunusova resubmitted an F31 Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award titled, "The effects of mindfulness on gut microbiome in patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome" in August.
• Claire Simmons was awarded the Behavioral Brain (B2) Trainee Grant in August.
• Kushani Shah was awarded a grant from the American Psychological Foundation, for her project titled 'Developing an interactive paradigm.' 

Conference Presentations and Talks

• Asal Yunasova submitted at abstract for a poster presentation at the upcoming Society for Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine (SBSM) conference, taking place in Seattle, WA next March.
• Members of the Behrmann Lab went to the Pediatric Epilpesy Surgery Alliance (PESA) conference in Boston this August to collect data from hemispherectomy patients who attend the conference with their families to learn about the new research and medical innovations related to their condition. See below!

Maria Chroneos and Kelly Martin from the Behrmann Lab standing in their experiment room during the Pediatric Epilepsy Surgery Alliance meeting in Boston this August.

Maria’s birthday dinner with the Behrmann lab (special guest: her sister) while the lab attends the Pediatric Epilepsy Surgery Alliance conference in Boston to collect patient data.

Professional Development

• Asal Yunusova completed her Digital Health Innovation Fellowship project for the Center for Machine Learning and Health.
• Asal Yunusova completed a Microbiome Analysis Workshop at the University of Maryland School of Medicine Institute for Genome Sciences.

Other News

• Congratulations to Dr. Austin Luor for successfully defending his dissertation in August. Austin has now started his postdoctoral fellowship at University of Texas Austin.
• Congratulations to Dr. Lakshmi Kumar for a successful private dissertation defense and defense showcase and celebration, the first of its kind. Lakshmi will be starting a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in their Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit this November.

Looking forward to Spooky season and sharing your future accomplishments!

I hope your summers have gotten off to a great start! I'm excited to share an update on the many impressive accomplishments that our graduate students have achieved between April and June. Read below to learn more about all of their new papers out and in the works, conference presentations, invited talks, workshops, and awards!

New Publications

• • Dedhe, A. M., Chowkase, A. A., Gogate, N. V., Kshirsagar, M. M., Naphade, R., Naphade, A., ... & Pandit, P. S. (2024). Conventional and frugal methods of estimating COVID-19-related excess deaths and undercount factors. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 10378.
  • Kaicher, C. M., Conti, J. J., Dedhe, A. M., Aulet, L. S., & Cantlon, J. F. (2024). Is core knowledge a natural subdivision of infant cognition?. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 47, e133.

Publications: Submissions and In Preparation

• Xie, Y., & Feeney, B. C. (Revised and Resubmitted). A review of mechanisms linking romantic relationship experiences to sleep quality. Sleep Advances.
  Yuxi revised and resubmitted her literature review to Sleep Advances.
• Oppenheimer, D. M., Cash, T. N., & Connell Pensky, A. E. (Under Review). You’ve got AI friend in me: LLMs as collaborative learning partners.

Conference Presentations and Talks

• Chroneos, M., Mayo, P., & Behrmann, M. (2024, May). Saccade Profiles Across Tasks After Childhood Hemispherectomy [Poster Session]. Annual Meeting of the Visual Sciences Society, St. Pete’s Beach, FL.
• Cash, T. N., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2024, June). Metacognitive knowledge in multi-attribute choice: Assessing the role of decision complexity. In V. Thompson (chair), MetaReasoning: What do metacognitive judgments tell us about reasoning? [Symposium]. International Conference on Thinking, Milan, Italy.
• Cash, T. N., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2024, June). Evaluating the accuracy of LLMs’ confidence judgments: A study of NFL predictions [Oral Presentation]. International Conference on Thinking, Milan, Italy.
• Lin, T.-J., Cash, T. N., Lee, H. J., Kim, S., Anderman, E. M., Cha, W., Liu, X., & Wen, Z. (2024, April). Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on gifted and non-identified early adolescents’ academic and social-emotional development [Poster Session]. Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Philadelphia, PA. 
• Dedhe, A. M. (Summer, 2024). Interdisciplinary Science: Understanding Cognition and Communities using Computation [Invited Talk]. Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune (IISER-Pune).
• Xie, Y. (Summer, 2024). Mechanism linking romantic relationship experiences to sleep quality [Oral Presentation]. In Bidirectional associations between social relationship experiences and sleep [Symposium]. (Yuxi will be chairing this symposium.)

Awards and Fellowships

• Abhishek and Yuxi both received the Roberta Klatzky Publication award.
• Fiona was awarded the Herb Simon teaching award.
• Sophie was awarded the Dick Hayes service award.
• Emefa was selected for the Carnegie Prize Graduate Student Fellowship to work with Dr. Richard Ivry. The fellowship provides stipend support for the 2024/2025 academic year, opportunities for mentorship, and a trip to Dr. Ivry’s lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
• Asal submitted an F31 Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award titled "The effects of mindfulness on gut microbiome in patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome" this past April.
  Austin received a travel award for Scientific Research Network on Decision Neuroscience & Aging (SRNDNA) Computational Modeling workshop in July.
• Fiona was awarded a Society for Health Psychology (SfHP, APA Division 38) Graduate Student Research Award.
• Yuxi was awarded a dissertation grant from the Mental Research Institute for her thesis, “Cyclical Processes Linking Couple Conflicts to Sleep Quality.”
• Urszula was awarded a ‘Dissemination of Research’ Award by SoQuiet Foundation. This covers publishing cost to publish her paper that she will hopefully be submitting in July with open-access! The paper explores pupil responses to disgusting sounds in misophonic and non-misophonic listeners.
• Megan has started a summer internship at Assemble.
• Sophie received a McClelland Award for Outstanding Paper in the CNBC.

Summer Schools and Workshops

• Austin was selected to participate in the 12th annual Communicating Science (ComSciCon) Flagship Workshop this summer.
• Emefa will be attending the Cognitive Neuroimaging Skills Training at the University of Cambridge in September. 
• Abhishek is currently at the Sante Fe Institute for a Computational Modelling workshop, where he met up with psychology alumnus, Patience Stevens! 

Other News

• Dr. Emily Lindsay, a psychology alumnus, was just offered a tenure track assistant professor position in psychology at University of Pittsburgh!
• Graduate students from the Psychology Department attended the annual Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition retreat at the Pittsburgh Botanic Garden.

Top: Jack Burgess, Sophie Robert, Raouf Belkhir
Bottom: Maria Chroneos, Emefa Akwayena, Urszula Oszczapinska Abhishek Dedhe

• The co-presidents of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition have been doing an excellent job leading the CNBC:

Urszula Oszczapinska and Emily Goldberg

Congratulations to everyone for their many achievements. Happy Beginning of July!

April Fool's is behind us and spring is here (hello April showers)! As we embark on the home stretch of the semester and academic year, please read about the latest accomplishments of our graduate students. Many new publications, grant submissions, awards, and other exciting developments!

New Publications

• Dedhe, A., Chowkase, A. A., Gogate, N., Naphade, A., Naphade, R., Kshirsagar, M., Kulkarni, P., Raste, S., Dharm, A., Patankar, S, Jogdeo, C., Sathe, A, Bapat, V, Joshi, R., Deshmukh, K., Lele, S., Manke, K., & Cantlon, J., & Pandit, P. (2024). Estimating excess COVID-19-related deaths: A multi-method approach [in press]. Scientific Reports.
  • Abhishek's paper on COVID-19 was accepted after a lot of unrelenting hard work and is currently in press.
• Cash, T., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (in press). Parental rights or parental wrongs: Parents’ metacognitive knowledge of the factors that influence their school choice decisions. PloSOne.
• Oszczapinska, U., Heller, L. M., Jang, S., & Nance, B. Ecological sound loudness in environmental sound representations. (2024). JASA Express Letters.
  • Urszula and her colleagues investigated whether the experimental custom of setting sounds to equal levels disrupts long-term sound recognition.

• Heller, L. M., Oszczapinska, U., Smith, J. M., & Julien, M. M.,“Reassigning sources of misophonic trigger sounds to change their pleasantness: Testing alternative mechanisms with a new set of movies, paintings, and words” was recently submitted for review!

Invited Talks

• Oszczapinska, U., Heller, L. M., Smith, J. M., & Julien, M. M. (February 2024). Altering the perceived cause of unpleasant and misophonic sounds with videos and words. Invited talk at a young-investigator symposium at Association for Research in Otolaryngology at their 47th Annual Midwinter meeting on Emerging Perspectives on Misophonia in Anaheim, CA.
  • Funding for travel was provided by the CNBC Career Development Award that Urszula was awarded by the CNBC.
• Dedhe, A. M., Kulshrestha, K., Piantadosi, S. T., & Cantlon, J. F. (2024). Psychological algorithms of hierarchical cognitive reasoning. Invited symposium speaker at the International Conference on Analogy, Amsterdam, NL.
• Kumar, L. (February 2024).  Social cognition and problematic alcohol use: An organizing theoretical framework and  suggestions for future work. Invited talk presented in the OSHER adult education program. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
• Yunusova, A. (February 2024). Irritable bowel syndrome: through the lens of health psychology. Invited talk presented in the OSHER adult education program. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA.

Asal presenting at the OSHER adult education program.

Conference Presentations

• Fiona presented a poster at the Society of Behavioral Medicine Conference: "Peer Interactions and Health Among Youth with Diabetes: An Ecological Momentary Assessment."
• Asal submitted an abstract, "The relation between stress and symptoms in Irritable Bowel Syndrome: A time series approach", for a poster to be presented at the Digestive Disorders Week conference.
• Kumar, L., Creswell, K.G., Brown, K.W., Lyons, G., Feeney, B.C. (Accepted for June 2024). The acute effects of alcohol on  emotion recognition in a sample of heavy-drinking young adults. Poster to be presented at the 47th annual meeting of the Research Society on Alcoholism. Minneapolis, MN.
• Zhou, A., Kumar, L., Lyons, G., Ethridge, H., & Creswell, K.G. (Accepted for May 2024). Acute alcohol intoxication impairs anger recognition. Poster to be presented at the 36th annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science. San Francisco, CA.

Grants and Awards

• Fiona was awarded an F31 from NIDDK for her dissertation, "Time-Varying Psychosocial Predictors of Blood Glucose Among Adults with Type 1 Diabetes."

Other News

• Abhishek was one of ten graduate students accepted to Santa Fe Institute's Graduate Summer Workshop on Computational Social Science!

Congratulations to all of the graduate students for their continuing hard work and recent successes!

Happy February! I hope you've started off the New Year on the right foot and are settling into the Spring semester. Please read about the recent accomplishments of our graduate students below!

New Publications

• Xie, Y. , & Feeney, B. C. ( Accepted). A Narrative Review of Research Linking Non-Sexual Social Touch to Sleep Quality. Journal of  Sleep Research.

Grants and Awards

• Emefa Akwayena had a poster entitled, "Ventral-Dorsal Stream Interactions Supporting Functional Object Grasps," accepted for a poster presentation at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting (April 2024) in Toronto, Canada.

Other News

• Austin Luor and Yuxi Xie successfully defended their dissertation proposals!
• Tim Murphy successfully defended his dissertation and is off to University of Wisconsin Madison to work as a postdoc with Ben Parrell and Carrie Niziolek at the end of the month.

Congratulations to everyone for their many achievements! If this newsletter has missed any exciting news, please send it along for the next edition!  Happy Spring Semester!