About

Current Research

I work with Dr. Chris Kello in the Cognitive Mechanics Lab at UC Merced on two projects:

• I am developing an information theoretic formal model of cognitive alignment between agents in a joint-action, communication task.
• We are examining emergent task assembly in the response behaviors of LLMs from the perspective of metastability in complex, adaptive systems.

I also work with Dr. Michael Spivey to assess if and to what extent an adaptive reservoir computing model is able to learn long-range dependencies in a simple linguistic training environment and apply these dependencies to resolve sentential ambiguity. This project’s goals are two-fold: 1) to determine if the sort of local computation performed by this model is capable of tracking hierarchical temporal structure and 2) to demonstrate how semantics and syntax can co-emerge as interdependent linguistic properties from simple adaptive behaviors of a cognitive agent entraining with its environment.

Background

During the completion of my undergraduate studies in cognitive science at Vassar College, I worked under Dr. Jan Andrews and Dr. Josh de Leeuw studying learned categorical perception (LCP). My time on this project included developing new methods for stimulus development leveraging generative adversarial neural networks to create latent perceptual dimensional spaces, producing an innovative adaptive staircasing procedure for crowd-sourced, online psychophysical data collection, and proposing a new method for statistically defining and testing for LCP effects.

My undergraduate studies in philosophy included focuses in metaphilosophy (especially with regard to philosophies of rationality, science, and mind), epistemology, and comparative philosophy (with a focus on Chinese philosophy). I consider studying under Dr. Bryan Van Norden, Dr. Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa, and Dr. Douglas Winblad to be especially formative to my philosophical training.