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Meet the Gorilla Grant 2019 Winners


I am Abbie Ball and am currently a third year PhD student at the university of Plymouth. My PhD project is looking into self-regulated study behaviours, specifically looking at when people decide to stop studying novel information. I am looking at the role metacognitive factors and motivation has on this, with the hope to apply my findings to real-world behaviours.

I’m Sarah Hendry, I am a third year PhD student at the University of Plymouth. My PhD project is investigating the proposed mechanisms of the testing effect. Our Gorilla project is a collaboration that is investigating whether the use of audio and visual modalities during study alters our study behaviour and the effectiveness of the study strategy used.

Abbie Ball (@Ball_abi) & Sarah HendryUniversity of Plymouth

I'm a second year PhD student in Psychology at Lancaster University. My study looks at how the brain processes the meaning of words, and especially, at the role of individual differences such as reading and perceptual experience.

Pablo Bernabeu (@PabloBernabeu_)
Lancaster University

I'm a Psychology PhD student with a passion for technology and fun. Hence, by matching both, I ended up studying Emoji and the role of Emoji in communication processes, from a Social and Cognitive Psychology perspective. My goal? Understand Emoji and maybe find a way to make them help individuals to communicate better, from interpersonal relationships to more distant relationships, such as commercial or professional interactions.

Bernardo CavalheiroISCTE-IUL

I am Giusy Cirillo. I am a second-year PhD student at the Laboratoire Parole et Language (Aix-Marseille University). My project aims at establishing a dataset of images normalized for French, which will constitute an open source for researchers investigating perception and cognition via picture-based methods.

Giusy Cirillo (@CirilloGiusy1)Aix-Marseille University

I am a Medical Doctor with a Ph.D. in neurosciences at Grenoble-Alpes University, France. My research focuses on several aspects of psychotic disorders. This includes studying cognitive and sensory processes and their relationship with functional outcome. My work also involves the application of non-invasive brain stimulation techniques (e.g. transcranial Electrical Stimulation) and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies as promising tools to alleviate manifestations of psychotic disorders.

Clément Dondé (@ClementDonde)Grenoble-Alpes University

My name is Toni Gibbs-Dean. I am a first year PhD student at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London. I am interested in investigating the relationship between altered value-based learning and decision making and various clinical and functional outcomes, in individuals with psychiatric disorder.

Toni Gibbs-Dean (@ToniGibbsDean1)King's College London

My name is Alexandra Hopkins, I'm a third year PhD student at Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing. My study will investigate the role of uncertainty on avoidance behaviour in people with high anxiety. I will use Computational Modelling to understand whether there is a relationship between uncertainty and cost sensitivity during early learning.

Alexandra HopkinsUniversity College London

I am Anqi Hu. I am a second year PhD student in the Language Acquisition and Brain Laboratory at the Linguistics and Cognitive Science Department at the University of Delaware. My study looks at how school-aged children learn novel words through direct and indirect storytelling. Direct social interaction (e.g. face-to-face storytelling) between adults and children is important in children’s vocabulary acquisition. However, in a naturalist learning environment, direct social interaction is not always available. Recent research revealed that school-aged children can learn nouns and verbs through indirect social interactions and overhearing. My study on Gorilla combines direct storytelling and indirect story overhearing into a novel paradigm to investigate how word learning through naturalistic input contributes to vocabulary development in school-aged children.

Anqi Hu (@AnqiHu6)University of Delaware

My name is Matthew and I'm a 2nd year PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London. My work is on the phonetics of swear words and how semantic/pragmatic information influences a listener's expectation when identifying sounds.

Matthew HuntQueen Mary University of London

I am Ni Jie, a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of South Florida. I was awarded the Gorilla Grant in 2019 for my thesis study of comparing approaches to handling the frame of reference effects in self-report personality research cross-culturally. The present research will assign participants from the U.S. and China to various experimental conditions to compare the efficacy of the prevailing method of using anchoring vignettes with different psychometric approaches. I would like to thank all the support and technical help from the Gorilla Team which helps me develop my study.

Ni JieUniversity of South Florida

I'm Julieta Laurino, I'm a first year PhD student at the Institute of Physiology, Molecular Biology and Neuroscience in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The aim of my research is to disentangle the mechanisms that allow the updating of words’ meaning.

Julieta Laurino (@JulietaLaurino)Universidad de Buenos Aires

Greetings! I'm Velvetina, an MRes student at UCL School of Management. My study looks at the influence of creativity on our ethical choices. Specifically, I am highly interested at the complexities involved in different creative stages (e.g. idea generation, idea selection) and how they individually affect the way we decide to harm or help others!

Velvetina Lim (@velvetinalim)University College London

I am Astrid Priscilla, I am a third year Psychology PhD student at University of Essex. My research examines the effect of working memory load and emotion processing on traits of ADHD within the general population. The Gorilla Platform will allow me to reach a wider audience, and to access to different populations within the UK in a short time period.

Astrid Priscilla Martinez Cedillo (@aspri09)University of Essex

I'm Colleen Mills-Finnerty, PhD and I am a Research Scientist at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration & Stanford University Dept. of Psychiatry & Behavioral Science. My study examines the role of attentional sensitivity to reward in healthy aging, with implications for late-life well being.

Colleen Mills-Finnerty (@CMillsFinn)Veteran’s Administration Palo Alto/Stanford University

We are Dr Kaja Mitrenga and Dr Ben Alderson-Day, we are psychologists interested in inner speech and unusual sensory experiences in clinical and non-clinical populations. Our Gorilla study will investigate the relations between perception of personality characteristics in faces and hallucination-proneness.

Kaja Mitrenga (@MitrengaKaja) & Ben Alderson-DayDurham University

Dr Emma Palmer-Cooper is from University of Southampton. She Co-leads a project investigating new ways to assess metacognition and hallucination-proneness in real-time and online, with people experiencing both psychosis and non-psychotic hallucinations. She leads this with Dr Abigail Wright, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and colleagues from King’s College London, Dr Matteo Cella, Marcella Montagnese and Prof Til Wykes, University of Glasgow, Nicola McGuire, University of Sussex, Jamie Moffatt, Dr Geoff Davies and Kathryn Greenwood, and Walden University, Dr Viktor Dlugunovych.

Emma Palmer-Cooper (@dr_emmaclaire)University of Southampton

I’m Madeleine Pownall, a PhD student in Social Psychology at the University of Leeds. My experimental work looks at the impact of social stereotypes on pregnant women’s cognitive functioning.

Madeleine Pownall (@maddi_pow)University of Leeds

I'm Renan Saraiva. I am a Lecturer in Forensic Psychology at the University of Portsmouth and a member of the International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology (ICRFP). My research is situated in the areas of investigative psychology and applied cognition in forensic settings. Our research on Gorilla focuses on the evaluation of eyewitness evidence by juries, judges and other triers of fact.

Renan Saraiva (@renanbsaraiva)University of Portsmouth

My name is Dionysia Saratsli and I am a 4th year PhD student, in Linguistics and Cognitive Science, at the University of Delaware. My study explores the role of social cognition in word learning and retention (PI: Dr. Zhenghan Qi, The Language Acquisition and Brain Lab at the University of Delaware). In general, I am interested in the pragmatic dimension of meaning and in language development and processing.

Dionysia Saratsli (@DionysiaSrs)University of Delaware

I am JT (Jonathan Tsay), a Psychology Ph.D. student in UC Berkeley studying how cognition interacts with action. My study investigates the role of the cerebellum to not only fine-tune our movements but also coordinate our thoughts.

Jonathan Tsay (@tsay_jonathan)University of California, Berkeley

My name is Stella Voulgaropoulou and I am a second year PhD student at Maastricht University. I am really happy to be one of the recipients of the Gorilla Grant award. This grant will help me expand my current lab-based work in order to investigate how cumulative stress (a known risk factor for psychopathology) is associated with cost-benefit decision-making. Using the Gorilla platform, I can benefit from the power of online testing to obtain new mechanistic insights into how stress exposure may lead to aberrant goal-directed behaviour.

Stella VoulgaropoulouMaastricht University

My name is Adam Weinberger and I am currently a 5th year PhD student at Georgetown University. One of my primary research interests is to understand how people form intuitions and explicit beliefs about their surrounding environment. My study investigates this process through the use of an implicit learning task in which participants are asked to respond to rapidly appearing and disappearing targets, which sometimes adhere to a complex pattern. The project will explore whether individuals who are better able to non-consciously learn these complex patterns develop more accurate intuitions of patterns, and whether these intuitions further influence the later emergence of more explicit knowledge.

Adam Weinberger (@Adam_Weinberger)Georgetown University

I'm Netanel, I'm a third year PhD student at the University of Oregon. My study looks at individual differences in mentalistic tendencies.

Netanel WeinsteinUniversity of Oregon

Hi! I’m Brendan Williams, and I am a second year PhD student at the University of Reading. My research is looking at how our decision making is influenced by the context of the environment which we are in.

Brendan Williams (@neuroBren)University of Reading

My name is Amanda Zamary and I’m a Postdoctoral Researcher at Duke University. The purpose of my research is twofold: (1) to identify effective techniques for enhancing learning and (2) understand when and how metacognition influences learning. The Gorilla Grant will help fund a new line of research in my research program, which aims to evaluate the extent to which ease of processing (i.e., fluency) is used as a proxy when learners make judgments about how well they are learning categories (e.g., species of birds, such as warblers, grosbeaks, and jays).

Amanda Zamary (@AmandaZamary)Duke University

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