About me

I’m currently a post-doctoral research associate in the Niv Lab at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Before this, I received my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Yale University and completed my clinical internship at the Bedford VA in Massachusetts.

I am fascinated by how we construct beliefs to make sense of our experiences – and how these beliefs can fall out of sync with consensus reality (as in delusions, conspiracy beliefs, overgeneralized beliefs related to traumatic experiences). In particular, my research focuses on the ways in which our beliefs are influenced by what and how we remember.

As a post-doc, I am exploring how individual differences in latent cause inference (i.e., the cognitive process of inferring hidden causes that explain observed patterns of events) shape memory and belief formation as it relates to mental health.

In my Ph.D. work at Yale, I studied the relationship between memory impairment and delusion-like beliefs. This work revealed several memory biases among members of the general population who endorse more positive symptoms (e.g., delusion-like beliefs, hallucination-like experiences) and disorganized thoughts. These include: 1) the tendency to remember things that were not actually encountered (i.e., a “false alarm” bias), 2) reduced sensitivity to shifts in context that typically serve to structure memory (i.e., disrupted event segmentation), and 3) a tendency to remember things as having happened just recently – even if they were encountered a while ago or were not encountered at all (i.e., a hyper-recency bias in temporal memory).