Heather Sheridan, PhD

Principal Investigator, Cognitive Area Head

Heather Sheridan is an Associate Professor in the Cognitive Area of the Psychology Department at UAlbany. She is the Director of the Visual Cognition Lab, and the Area Head of the Cognitive Psychology PhD program (https://www.albany.edu/psychology/programs/phd-cognitive-psychology). She previously completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Southampton, U.K., which was supported by the NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship (PDF) program. She completed her PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Toronto. Link to CV.

Andriana Christofalos, PhD

Postdoctoral Associate

Reading is a highly demanding skill that depends on the intricate coordination of multiple processes, involving both lower-level visual and higher-level cognitive functions. Such processes encompass allocating attentional resources, visually identifying words, planning and executing saccades, and integrating meanings across words to form a coherent mental representation of a text. My research aims to explore the complex interaction between these lower-level and higher-level processes that influence reading. I accomplish this by focusing my work on how reading fluency and comprehension are impacted by three key factors:

1) individual differences in reading

2) visual aspects of text

3) the allocation of attention during reading tasks

I employ a variety of techniques to investigate these topics, including eye-tracking, computational modeling, the co-registration of eye-movements and EEG, and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

Website: www.andrianachristofalos.com

Current Graduate Students

Madison Laks, MA

Madison is a fifth-year graduate student pursuing her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology. Madison’s research is focused on studying how the age at which a word is learned (i.e., age-of-acquisition) impacts proofreading performance, specifically using eye-tracking methodology to examine the time course of typo detection during proofreading. Looking toward the future, Madison is hoping to apply her research skills and understanding of visual cognition to a career in user experience (UX) research and user interface (UI) design.

Nicole M. Arco, MA

My name is Nicole M. Arco, MA, and I am a fourth-year graduate student pursuing my Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology. My research is focused on studying visual expertise to understand how experts process domain-specific features to quickly locate a target. More recently, I have extended this work to include examining how expert musicians process cross-modal auditory-visual stimuli during a complex visual search task. This work carries significant implications for various fields involving visual search, including TSA, military operations, radiology, athletics, and video games.

Caroline Rafizadeh, MSc

Caroline is a second-year Cognitive Psychology PhD student in the Visual Cognition Lab. Her research currently focuses on factors such as perceptual specificity and visual memory in music reading in both expert musicians and novices. Through eye-tracking, she also explores chunking and template theories as they relate to both visual processing and memory retrieval. Outside of the lab, Caroline enjoys jazz and classical singing, hiking, and boxing.

Current Undergraduate Students

Ashley Rogliano

I am currently a senior at the university of Albany, majoring in Psychology with a minor in anthropology. I plan on furthering my education in graduate school in hopes of becoming a cognitive psychologist. This is my first time working as a Research assistant and I’m thrilled to begin my journey into the Research side of psychology.

Arianna Lange

Arianna has been an undergraduate research assistant in the VCL since Fall 2022. She is a pre-med student at UAlbany majoring in biology and public health with minors in bioethics and psychology. Her research interests focus on how cognitive psychology can be used to examine and improve modern medicine. Arianna is currently working on an independent project alongside Dr. Christofalos investigating comprehension of prescription information.

Bonnie Stern

I’m Bonnie Stern, and I am a senior at UAlbany. While I am majoring in chemistry, I’ve always had a strong pull towards the field of psychology. I have been an undergraduate research assistant in the Visual Cognition Lab since Fall 2022. I began an independent study project this semester under the supervision of Postdoctoral Associate, Dr. Christofalos, examining how the presence of emojis impacts reading comprehension outcomes. Outside of the lab, I enjoy reading, hiking, traveling, and spending time with my family!

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