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.

Current Graduate Students

Madison Laks, PhD

Madison successfully defended her dissertation in October, 2025! 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 fifth-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 third-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.

Heather Sheridan, PhD

Current Graduate Students

Madison Laks, PhD

Nicole M. Arco, MA

Caroline Rafizadeh, MSc

Current Undergraduate Students

Iris Tamura, Research Assistant

Former Lab Members

Eliza Barach, PhD

Andriana Christofalos, PhD

Abigail Kleinsmith, PhD

Arianna Lange, Research Assistant

Kinnera Maturi, PhD

Ashley Rogliano, Research Assistant

Bonnie Stern, Research Assistant