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!