The Halloween treats are gone, but the real treat is sharing the exciting progress of our graduate students! As we settle into November, I'm thrilled to showcase the fantastic work they have been doing since September. Make sure to read the announcements at the end!

Publications

• Villavicencio, P., Tsay, J. S., & de la Malla, C. (2025). Target configuration determines how and what we learn during sensorimotor adaptation. Accepted in npj Science of Learning.
  -Pam is a visiting Ph.D. student in Jonathon Tsay's lab from the University of Barcelona.
• Huang, L., Chen, E., Hayen, R., Kim, J., Passarelli, V., & Lam, P. H. (Under review). Peer racial representation at school, social experiences, and inflammation among Black adolescents. Health Psychology.
  -Letian submitted her first year project to Health Psychology. 

Conference Presentations

•  Jinhee Kim will be presenting a poster, “Representational similarity analysis of EEG reveals multiple spatiotemporal dynamics of auditory selective attention,” with co-authors Wenkang An, Abigail L. Noyce, and Barbara G. Shinn-Cunningham at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference this November in San Diego, CA.
• Kaylee Foor will be presenting a poster, "Social Rejection, Social Support, and Cognition Among LGBTQ+ Young Adults," with co-author Michael Trujillo at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in February in Chicago, IL. Kaylee received a Graduate Registration Stipend award for the conference.

Grants & Awards

• Kushani Shah received the Scholarly Project Funding (formerly GuSH) for her research titled "The Social Side of Drug Craving: Acute Effects on Empathy in Smokers."
• Katie Chase was awarded the B2 fellowship.
• Anjuli Niyogi received the Bastian Fellowship associated with the Carnegie Mellon Brain Prize this year to Dr. Amy Bastian. 
• Indranil Nyamsuren received the Dietrich Fellowship. 
• Anjuli Niyogi submitted her National Science Foundation GRFP application. 

Professional Development

•  Jenah Black has accepted a position as a Research Scientist Intern at the Meta Reality Labs working with their Audio team, starting in June.
• Asal Yunusova successfully defended her thesis proposal, "Mindfulness and the Gut Microbiome in Irritable Bowel Syndrome" in August.
• Julia Conti successfully defended her thesis proposal, "Skepticism Facilitates Relational Discovery" in October. 

Announcements

•  Jenah Black is serving as the graduate student representative on the university search committee for the new dean of Dietrich College. She encourages any student or faculty who has input on the search process to reach out to her and share their thoughts!
• Join the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC)! Membership is open to faculty, postdocs, and students in the Pitt-CMU neuroscience community. We have two types of membership – affiliate and core.
  • Affiliate is for those who want to receive updates about goings-on in the CNBC, but aren’t ready to fully participate in the program at this time.
  • Core membership comes with a service expectation for faculty and postdocs, and a graduate certificate for students who fulfill the training requirements. 
  • It also gives priority access to CNBC funding and many other exciting opportunities! Affiliate members can switch to Core membership at any time.
  • Marissa Laws is happy to answer any questions as she recently joined the CNBC Postdoc Committee.
  • If you are interested in scientific communication, the CNBC Communications Committee is looking for writers to contribute to a piece to a new blog. Right now we are just gauging interest, so if you'd like to learn more or be contacted in the future about opportunities, please reach out to Indranil Nyamsuren or Sophie Robert. 

I am looking forward to us finishing the Fall Semester off strong and, as always,  sharing your future accomplishments!

I hope you're all enjoying the crisper air, clearer skies, and the beginning of fall season! As we settle into the new semester (can you believe it's already Week 2?), take a moment to check out the latest highlights from our graduate students, showcasing their impressive achievements from this summer (June - August).

New Publications

• Qiu, Y., Park, S., Oszczapinska, U., & Heller, L. M. (2025). Visual disgust constricts pupils in response to misophonic movies. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1569598.
• Dedhe, A. M., Kulshrestha, K., Kulkarni, S., Piantadosi, S. T., & Cantlon, J. F. (2025). Dendrophilia versus continuity in hierarchical reasoning. Paper published in Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society which took place in San Francisco, CA this August. Presented as a poster.
• Choi, R., & Rakison, D. (2025). First Contact: Children’s Emerging Sensitivity to Causality in Second-Order Learning. Paper published in Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society which took place in San Francisco, CA this August. Presented as a poster.
• Chroneos, M. Z.,  Behrmann, M.* and Mayo, J. P.* (*equal authors). (2025, in press). Bidirectional and Asymmetric Smooth Pursuit Deficits in Childhood Hemispherectomy Patients, Cortex. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cor tex.2025.08.005 
• Robert, S.*, Granovetter, M. C.* and Behrmann, M. (2025, in press). Space- and object-based attentional processing in typical development and childhood hemispherectomy, Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s4159 8-025-13704-x 
• Liu, T. T.*, Granovetter, M. C.*, Maallo, A. M. S., Robert, S., Fu, J. Z., Patterson, C., Plaut, D.C. and Behrmann, M. (2025, in press). Cross-sectional and longitudinal category-selectivity in visual cortex following pediatric cortical resection, Communications Biology.

Conference Presentations & Talks

•  Julia Conti presented a poster with co-authors Ken Koedinger and Paulo Carvalho entitled, "What’s going on? Surprising limitations in relational rule learning" at the 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society held in San Francisco in August.
• Julia Conti was awarded the J. Frank Yates Student Travel Award to present a poster with co-authors Ken Koedinger and Paulo Carvalho entitled, "It's all shapes to me: Blocking aids discovery of complex relational structures" at Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society this November.
• Ricky Choi will be presenting a poster with co-author David Rakison entitled, "When Contact Matters: Semantic Similarity Analysis of Vectorized Event Descriptions Reveals Event-Specific Causal Representations" at The Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society this November. 
• Kushani Shah will be presenting a poster with co-authors Mia Pogach, Carillon J. Skrzynski, & Kasey Creswell entitled, "The Role of Trait Impulsivity in Craving, Attentional Bias, and Smoking Behavior" at the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT), taking place in Baltimore in March 2026.
• Maria Chroneos will be presenting a poster with co-authors Patrick J. Mayo and Marlene Behrmann entitled, "Naturalistic Visual Search After Childhood Hemispherectomy" at the American Epilepsy Society meeting this December.

Professional Development

•  Urszula Oszczapinska completed a summer internship at Milwaukee Tool where she was a researcher on the digital team and had the opportunity to consult as a human auditory perception expert on a product that will be launching within the next year.

Other News

• Congratulations to Urszula Oszczapinska for successfully proposing her dissertation!
• Yuxi Xie defended her dissertation (and presented her dissertation showcase) in June, then moved to Macau for her assistant professorship at the University of Macau.
•  Abhishek Dedhe graduated with a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience and a Graduate Certificate in Quantitative Methods. He will be starting as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Computational Social Science and Judgement Across Cultures with professors Igor Grossmann and Sam Johnson at the University of Waterloo. The project is part of the Wise Judgment Consortium. He'll be conducting agent-based modelling of wise decision-making that reflects the complexity and cultural diversity of real-world scenarios. 

Looking forward to Fall season and sharing your future accomplishments!

After a stretch of grey skies and chilly 50-degree days, today’s sunshine was a welcome change. I hope you had a chance to step outside and enjoy it. What better way to end a beautiful day than by catching up on the latest accomplishments of our graduate students? Read on to see what they've been up to!

Paper Submissions & Publications

• Choi, R. & Rakison, D. H. (2025). First Contact: Children’s Emerging Sensitivity to Causality in Second-Order Learning. In A. Ruggeri, D. Barner, C. Walker, & N. Bramley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• Simmons, C., Krasich, K., Chitre, A., Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2025). Does conscious perception render agents more responsible? A study of lay judgments. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, (119)104757, ISSN 0022-1031.
• Helgeson, V. S., & Horner, F. S. (in press). Communal Coping with Type 2 Diabetes: A Five-Year Measurement Burst Study. Health Psychology.
• Liu, T. T.*, Granovetter, M. C.*, Maallo, A. M. S., Robert, S., Fu, J. Z., Patterson, C., Plaut, D.C. and Behrmann, M. (in press). Cross-sectional and longitudinal category-selectivity in visual cortex following pediatric cortical resection. Communications Biology. *equal authors
• Cash, T., Oppenheimer, D. M., Christie, S., & Devgan, M. (accepted pending revisions). Quantifying Uncert-AI-nty: Testing the Accuracy of LLMs’ Confidence Judgments. Memory & Cognition.
• Chroneos, M. Z., Behrmann, M.* and Mayo, J. P.* (accepted pending revisions). Childhood hemispherectomy results in ipsilesional smooth pursuit deficits with compensatory saccades. Cortex. *equal authors
• Yunusova, A., Huang, C., Price, S., Joshi, K., Dutcher, J. M., Brown, K. W., Villalba, D. K., Tumminia, M. J., Creswell, K. G., Cohen, S., & Creswell, J. D. (revise and resubmit). Depression trajectories and their associations with academic performance and sleep patterns among first year college students. BMC Psychology.
• Waller, M., Nambiar, D., Tomasic, A., Elston, M., Thiessen, E. (under review). Characterizing Children’s Naturalistic Narratives via Machine Learning to Language Development Research. [Fun CMU connections: Madeline Elston is a former undergrad (English major) and the journal (totally open-access to read and publish) was founded by Brian MacWhinney.]

Conference Presentations & Talks

• Jacob Yeung will give an oral presentation on his paper "Reanimating Images using Neural Representations of Dynamic Visual Stimuli," at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) this year. [His work was ranked 96 / 13008, and was in the top 0.7% of all submissions!]
• Eloise Gacetta will present "Spatial Visualization Learning in the Math, Motor, and Language Networks" with co-authors Marissa Laws, Teoman S. Ozaydin, Lauren Aulet, and Jessica F. Cantlon in September at the Flux Society conference in Dublin, Ireland.
• Letain Huang presented a poster, "The impact of perceived stigma on psychological well-being among the LGBTQ community, in February at the Society of Personality and Social Psychology conference in Denver, CO.
• Letian Huang gave an oral presentation, "Discrimination, loneliness, and inflammation: Longitudinal associations among black adolescents with low socioeconomic status," with co-authors Chen, E., Wang, L., Boe, A., Zhou, A., & Lam, P. H. in March at the Society for Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine, in Seattle, WA.
• Claire Simmons presented a poster, "Network architecture of object recognition: Investigating integration between dorsal and ventral visual pathways" with co-authors Vlad Ayzenberg, and Marlene Behrmann, in May at the Vision Sciences Society conference in St. Petersburg, FL.
• Sophia Robert presented a poster, "Temporal network dynamics in the intact hemisphere following pediatric cortical resection", with co-authors Michael Granovetter, Christina Patterson, and Marlene Behrmann, in May at the Vision Sciences Society conference in St. Petersburg, FL.

 
The Behrmann lab and friends have dinner together at Vision Sciences Society meeting in St. Pete's Beach, FL.

Professional Development

• Claire Simmons was awarded a National Eye Institute Early Career Scientist Travel Grant to attend the 2025 Vision Sciences Society Meeting.

Other News

• Trent Cash successfully defended his dissertation on May 27th!

Congratulations to everyone for their achievements. Happy Beginning(ish) of Summer!

Spring has officially sprung — and so have our students’ accomplishments. It’s April Fools’ Day… so is this newsletter a prank? Only one way to find out — read on and see for yourself. 

Paper Submissions & Publications

• Yeung, J., Luo, A. F., Sarch, G., Henderson, M. M., Ramanan, D., & Tarr, M. J. (2025). Reanimating Images using Neural Representations of Dynamic Visual Stimuli.
• Cash, T., Lin, T. J., Lee, H. J., Kim, S., Anderman, E., Cha, W., Liu, X., & Wen, Z. (R & R). School well-being during the Covid-19 pandemic: A study of academic motivation, need satisfaction, and school liking among gifted and non-identified early adolescents.
• Cash, T., Oppenheimer, D., Pensky, A. C. (R & R). You’ve got AI friend in me: LLMs as collaborative learning partners.
• Chroneos, M. Z., Behrmann M., Mayo, J. P. (under review). Bidirectional and Asymmetric Smooth Pursuit Deficits in Childhood Hemispherectomy Patients. 
• Cash, T., & Oppenheimer, D. (under review). Investigating resource-rational strategic allocation of metacognitive resources in multi-attribute choice decisions.
• Yunusova, A., Huang, C., Price, S., Joshi, K., Dutcher, J. M., Brown, K. W., Villalba, D. K., Tumminia, M. J., Creswell, K. G., Cohen, S., & Creswell, J. D. (under review). Depression trajectories and their associations with academic performance and sleep patterns among first year college students.

Conference Presentations & Talks

• Julia Conti submitted a paper to present at, "What's going on? Surprising limitations in relational rule learning" at the Cognitive Science meeting this July in San Francisco, CA.
• Asal Yunusova presented a poster, "Digital Mindfulness Training for Late Adolescents with IBS" at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine. 

Professional Development

• Asal Yunusova was awarded the Herb Simon Graduate Student Teaching Award.

• Fiona Horner received a summer internship with Dexcom, a maker of continuous glucose monitors for people with diabetes to be a part of their behavioral science team!

Other News

• Trent Cash has accepted a postdoctoral position in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo!

Congratulations to everyone for their achievements so far this semester. Happy Beginning of Spring!

P.S. It's April 2nd now. No pranks! Hope you had a happy April Fool's :)

Happy February and welcome to the first newsletter of 2025! I hope the New Year is off to a great start and that you’re settling in smoothly for the Spring semester. Below you’ll find highlights of our graduate students’ recent accomplishments, please join me in congratulating them on their achievements!

New Publications

• Horner, F. S., Helgeson, V. S. (in press). Glucose in the dynamic psychosocial environment: Findings from adolescents with type 1 diabetes. Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine (previously Psychosomatic Medicine).
• Horner, F. S., Helgeson, V. S. (in press). Psychosocial predictors of short-term blood glucose among people with diabetes: A narrative review. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 1-23. 
• Oszczapinska, U., Park, S., Qiu, Y., Nance, B., Julien, M., & Heller, L. M. (in press).The impact of disgusting sounds on pupil diameter of misophonic and non-misophonic listeners.  Psychophysiology.
• Blauch, N. M., Plaut, D. C., Vin, R., and Behrmann, M. (in press). Individual variation in the functional lateralization of human ventral temporal cortex: Local competition and long-range coupling, Imaging Neuroscience.
• Granovetter, M. C., Maallo, A. M. S., Ling, S., Robert, S., Patterson, C. and Behrmann, M. (2024). Functional Resilience of the Neural Visual Recognition System Post-Pediatric Occipitotemporal Resection, iScience, 27, 111440.

Articles Under Review

• Xie, Y., Chin, B. N., & Feeney, B. C. (under review). Links Between Discrimination and Sleep Quality: The Mediating Role of Negative Affect. Social and Personality Psychology Compass.
• Mitala, J., Jakubiak, B. K.,  Xie, Y., & Feeney, B.C. (under review). Yours, Mine, and Ours: Sense of Purpose as a Dyadic Phenomenon in Romantic Relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
• Robert, S., Granovetter, M. C., Ling., S., & Behrmann, M. (under review). Space- and object-based attention in patients with a single hemisphere following childhood resection. Scientific Reports.

Grant Submissions

Asal Yunusova submitted a 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 December.

Conference Presentations

• Kulshrestha, K.,  Dedhe, A. M., Piantadosi, S. T., & Cantlon, J. F. (2025). Hierarchical Structure Generation in Pre-School Children and Adults in Two Ecologically-Valid Tasks. Poster accepted at 39th National Conference on Undergraduate Research.
• Karishma Kulshrestha is an undergraduate student mentored by Abhishek Dedhe and, under his mentorship, she had a poster accepted for the National Conference on Undergraduate Research Conference in April and she won a Small Undergraduate Research Grant (SURG) from CMU as well.  
• Jacob Yeung participated in the French American Doctoral Exchange (FADEx) this January, in which he visited several French institutions and presented his work on motion decoding and video reanimation from fMRI (see the arXiv manuscript).

Other News

• Jacob Yeung successfully completed his PNC First Year Milestone oral presentation in December.
• Abhishek Dedhe was covered in a Dietrich College news story which showcased his independent, volunteer research on pandemic preparedness in Pune.
• Yuxi Xie has a job offer for an Assistant Professor position at the University of Macau and has been very productive in her research, finishing collection of all of her dissertation data, which was a labor intensive feat. 

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!