Undergraduate Research Assistants
Sarah Peykar • sarahpeykar@berkeley.edu
Sarah is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley studying Integrative Biology and Psychology. She is interested in researching how the brain processes relations for different tasks and in different individuals using neuroimaging as well as computational modeling. In the lab, she assists with the protocol designs and data collection by using behavioral methodology to investigate the neural mechanisms behind relational thinking.
Kristin Dang • kristindang@berkeley.edu
Kristin is a fourth year undergraduate student studying Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley. She is interested in using behavioral and functional neuroimaging methods to understand the neural mechanisms of higher cognitive processes. In the lab, she is working on statistical data analysis and data collection for the abstract relations study.
Jaquelyn Borcea • jborcea@berkeley.edu
Jaquelyn is a fourth year undergraduate student studying Cognitive Science and minoring in Data Science. She has been a part of the lab since 2022 and has worked on the AbRel project scanning participants, recruiting, and analyzing results. Now she is part of the RelDom project where she assisted in creating tasks, recruiting participants, running behavioral and fMRI experiments. Her favorite part of the lab is scanning participants and running behavioral experimental sessions.
Narod Berberian • narodb23@berkeley.edu
Narod is a fourth-year undergraduate student studying Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is interested in the neural basis of memory formation and cortical layer connectivity. In the lab, she conducts behavioral and fMRI testing, generates experimental stimuli, and assists with the development of protocol narratives.
Jie (Jasper) Liu • jasperl@berkeley.edu
Jasper is a fourth-year undergraduate majoring in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He is interested in exploring machine learning techniques in imaging scanning technologies. In the lab, his main responsibilities include processing stimuli, programming the PsychoPy scripts, and analyzing data.
Graduate Students
Elena Leib • eleib@berkeley.edu
“I study learning, reasoning, and executive functions in children and the relationships among them. I am especially interested in relational reasoning in the domains of math and science. I am also interested in using eye-tracking to better understand how learning unfolds over time. I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with honors in 2015. My research is generously supported by the Berkeley Fellowship.”
Postdoctoral fellows
Katherine (Kay) Alfred • Katherine.L.Alfred@dartmouth.edu
Kay is a postdoc working with David Kraemer at Dartmouth and Silvia Bunge on an NSF project focused on abstract relations and analogical reasoning. In addition to her research in analogical and deductive reasoning, she collaborates with Brendan Nyhan (Dartmouth College, Government Department) on research examining the cognitive processes that underlie motivated reasoning, supported by the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth.
Closest Current Collaborators
Kevin Weiner, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley
David Kraemer, Associate Professor at Dartmouth
Keith Holyoak and Hongjing Lu, Professors at UCLA
Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, Professor at Northeastern University and Principal Research Scientist at MIT
Emilio Ferrer, Professor at the University of California, Davis
Yana Fandakova (former postdoc in the lab), Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany and soon-to-be Professor at Trier University and Ulman Lindenberger, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin
Elena Galeano-Keiner (former postdoc in the lab) and Garvin Brod (former visiting scholar in the lab), Department of Education and Human Development at Goethe University
And more!!