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Due to the large quantity and high quality of applications, we decided to nearly double the number of tokens in the prize pool, creating four tiers of prizes.

Meet all the talented winners of the grants!


Anna Giarratana

@AOGiarratana



University of Zurich

"Hi! I am Anna Giarratana, and I am an MD-PhD student at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, currently doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Zurich at the Zurich Center for Neuroeconomics. My postdoctoral work is in the lab of Dr. Philippe Tobler, investigating the effect that schizotypal personality traits have on the ability of people to adapt in visual and reward decision-making tasks. Our work has the potential to uncover novel information about the spectrum of schizophrenia, which future studies could build on to develop better diagnostics and targeted treatment interventions."


Pedro Conesa

@PJConesa



University of Murcia

"I am a second year PhD student in Psychology Educational at the University of Murcia (Spain). My research focuses on the interplay of executive functions, motivation and need-supportive teaching style in school context with a special emphasis in how to develop and train them in order to improve wellbeing and academic achievement in late elementary school students. The Gorilla Platform will help me to get to many differents schools located all around the country."


Soledad Picco

@solepicco_



Universidad de Buenos Aires

"I'm Soledad Picco, I'm a third year PhD student at the Institute of Physiology, Molecular Biology and Neuroscience (IFIByNE-UBA-CONICET) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My study aims to analyse and deeply characterize the dynamics of memory reactivation and the following reconsolidation process of aversive and neutral memories."


Adam John Privitera



The University of Hong Kong

"I'm Adam John Privitera, a second year PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. My research explores the relationship between second language experience, cognitive function, and academic performance. Currently, I am conducting a project in Mainland China (Shenzhen) focusing on the impact of English language experience in native Mandarin speaking high school students."


Tessa Clarkson



The University of Queensland

"My name is Tessa Clarkson, and I am a second-year PhD student at The University of Queensland, Australia. My research interests surround memory encoding strategies in older and younger adults. Specifically, I am researching how we encode self-relevant information better than other-relevant information (The Self-Reference Effect) and how reward may boost performance further. The findings may help us develop strategies to preserve memory in the elderly."


Ella Macaskill

@MacaskillElla



Victoria University of Wellington

"Hi! My name is Ella, and I’m a MSc student specialising in Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience at Victoria University of Wellington. My study investigates how deficits in face memory might contribute to developmental prosopagnosia, which is a condition in which people have difficulty recognising faces despite having no brain damage and typical intelligence."


Emma Libersky

@EmmaLibersky



University of Wisconsin-Madison

"I'm Emma Libersky, a second year PhD student in the Language Acquisition & Bilingualism Lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison. My project looks at the effect of speech disfluencies (i.e., the filler words "um" and "uh") on adult word learning."


Seeon Kim



Arizona State University

"I’m Seeon Kim and I am a second-year PhD student in Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. My project is focusing on training of Mandarin tone recognition with amplitude envelope enhancement in cochlear implant simulation (PI: Dr. Xin Luo, the Cochlear Implant Lab at ASU). I would like to enhance speech recognition for cochlear implant users with novel auditory training paradigms.Thanks to Gorilla which allowed me to keep my study going even in the pandemic."


Ashley Doonan



Saint Louis University

"My name is Ashley Doonan, and I'm a second year PhD student in Cognitive Neuroscience at Saint Louis University. As a member of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Stress lab, I research the role of stress and cognition on health. My study seeks to understand the impact of chronic stress on risk-based decision making in the context of the pandemic. This research will examine how college age adults may be differentially impacted by the crisis and how this may influence their risk-based decisions about health and safety."


Mahsa Barzy

@BarzyMahsa



University of Reading

"My name is Mahsa Barzy. I am currently working as a postdoc in Dr Gray’s social perception lab at University of Reading. In our research, we are studying visual perception of social interactions and using the Gorilla Grant, I will be investigating whether we have specific mechanisms to detect and process social interactions viewed from third-person perspectives."


Michelle Hurst

@michelleahurst1



University of Chicago

"I'm Michelle Hurst, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago. In my current research, I am interested in how people reason about quantitative information and the relations among this information. In this study, I am investigating the development of relational reasoning and how it might vary across different relations (e.g., physical size versus numerical size), different representations (e.g., symbolic "4" vs. four items), and different levels of relational reasoning (i.e., which of two sets has more vs. which of two sets has a higher proportion)."


Emre Orun



University of Leicester

"My name is Emre Orun. I am currently a 3rd year PhD student within University of Leicester's department of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Behaviour. My research explores the theme of 3D vs 2D visual search, while examining differences in performance pertaining to accuracy and search strategies. The effect of bilingualism is also investigated as a confounding variable (as representative of individual differences)."


David Tompkins

@davidntompkins



Cornell University

"I’m David Tompkins, a first-year PhD student at Cornell University. I’m interested in the ways that early childhood and emerging technology interact. In this study, we are testing a new face-based control scheme for very young children. We are hopeful that this may provide an intuitive response mechanism that can be used in remotely delivered experiments."


Elizabeth Wood



University of Texas at Austin

"I'm Elizabeth Wood, I'm a fourth year PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. My research focuses on vowels and prosody in K'iche' (a Mayan language of Guatemala), Spanish and English. This study, which is a joint project with Mackenzie Walters and Dr. Megan Crowhurst, addresses the use of laryngealization as a marker of utterance-internal prosodic boundaries to help disambiguate ambiguous sentences in the speech of Spanish-English bilinguals."


Chika Okafor

@chikaokafor_



Harvard University

"I am Chika Okafor, an Economics PhD Candidate at Harvard University and JD Graduate from Yale Law School. My study explores two related issues: preferences for environmentalism and public support for climate change policies."


Catherine Naughtie



University of Bath

"My name is Catherine Naughtie, I’m a psychology PhD student at the University of Bath and a member of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Advanced Automotive Propulsion Systems. My research looks at road user behaviour and interactions between different classes of road users, with a particular focus on cyclists and pedestrians. This project will analyse how people adapt to changes in the way a control system responds their inputs and will provide insights into how autonomous and adaptive systems can be safely integrated into vehicles."


Bronson Hui

@BronsonHui



Michigan State University

"My name is Bronson Hui, a PhD candidate in the Second Language Studies program at Michigan State University, USA. I am interested in lexical processing development, reading-while-listening comprehension, and quantitative research methods. My work has appeared or will appear in Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Language Learning, Applied Psycholinguistics, among other venues. In my dissertation, I investigate the dimensionality of lexical (vocabulary) knowledge of language leaners using both traditional, accuracy-based tests and psycholinguistic, reaction time-based tasks. I intend to address the fundamental question of what it means to know a word in second language vocabulary research. Gorilla is my primary platform for my data collection."


Britt Davis-Pierson



WSU & PNNL

"My name is Britt Davis-Pierson, and I am a student in the MS CS program at Washington State University. This grant will go towards my work on using visualizations of Artificial Intelligence as a form explanation to facilitate human understanding of AI. The work will move us towards being able to deploy trustworthy AI more widely in society."


John Rogers

@rogersisinbrno



The Education University of Hong Kong


Bayparvah Kaur Gehdu

@bayparvah



Birkbeck, University of London

"Hi! My name is Bayparvah Kaur Gehdu and I'm a first-year PhD student at Birkbeck, University Of London. I have a background in Clinical Neurodevelopmental Sciences, specialising in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). I am particularly interested in understanding how individuals on the ASD spectrum identify and understand emotions and modulate their behaviour accordingly. Specifically, I am researching how individuals encode facial identity and facial emotion and how potential difficulties in these processes may contribute or underlie some of the social communication difficulties seen in ASD. These findings will theoretically inform accounts of high-level vision. Furthermore, the proposed research will help us understand how often, and to what extent, face recognition difficulties undermine the quality of life of individuals with autism."


Grace Clark

@Grace_T_Clark



New York University

"I'm Grace Clark, a 3rd year PhD student at NYU in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders. The aim of my research is to discover interventions to help minimally verbal children with autism communicate more effectively. Specifically, I am examining the effect of written words as a support for word learning. I am using webcam eye-tracking to determine if participants are using the written information and if this varies depending on the participant's literacy skills."


Emmett Larsen

@emmett_larsen



Stony Brook University

"I'm Emmett Larsen, a third-year graduate student in the clinical science PhD program at Stony Brook University. My research is seeking to understand belief-updating biases related to delusions in psychosis and schizotypy, with a particular focus on the role of emotion."


Oksana Zinchenko

@zinchneuro



HSE University, Moscow

"Greetings! I am Oksana Zinchenko, PhD at the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, HSE University in Moscow, Russia. I am delighted to be one of the recipients of the Gorilla Grant award this year. One of my primary research interests is social norms and the mechanisms of its enforcement. My students and I will investigate the relations between personality characteristics, conformity and the compliance to COVID-19 protective measures."


Jessica Knötzele



University of Freiburg

"My name is Jessica Knötzele and I am currently a master student at the University of Freiburg in Germany. In my master thesis project I will focus on odor-cued learning effects. It is known that during learning, the learning contents can be associated with an concurrently presented odor cue. Presenting the same cue during sleep seems to reactivate the odor-associated short-term memorized learning contents and increases their probability of being consolidated. We can therefore influence – to some degree – what will be stored in our long-term memory by using odor cues. Moreover, a recent study from our lab indicates that odor cues may additionally support memory retrieval."


Lisa Keenan

@lisa_keenan1



University College Dublin

"My name is Lisa and I'm a second year PhD student at the Neuropsychology Lab in University College Dublin. My research examines sleep and executive functions in children with Tourette syndrome."


Mikael Rubin



University of Texas at Austin

"I'm Mikael, a PhD student in clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Broadly, my research interests are related to the intersection of psychopathology and attentional mechanisms. My study supported by the Gorilla Grant looks at how trauma memories are processed."


Anne Neveu



University of Wisconsin - Madison

"I'm a Communication Sciences and Disorders PhD student at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, with a first Ph.D. in Translation Studies from Kent State University. My research interests focus on bilingual language acquisition and development from childhood to adulthood. More specifically, I am interested in how various bilingual experiences, such as dual-language immersion classrooms or translation experience, affect language abilities, and whether other cognitive functions play a role in language and speech processing."


Anastasiia Mikhailova

@ana_mikh



Instituto Superior Técnico Universidade de Lisboa

"My name is Anastasiia Mikhailova, and I am a first year PhD student at Instituto Superior Técnico at University of Lisbon at Electric and Computer Engineering Program. My research is focused on understanding of visual long-term memory encoding mechanisms using such technologies as eye-tracking, EEG and computational modelling."


Amy Hutchinson

@amyehutchinson



Purdue University

"I'm Amy Hutchinson, a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Linguistics Department at Purdue University. My current research project explores the role of foreign film on the development of non-native speech production and perception."


Matthew S. Welhaf

@MattWelhaf



University of North Carolina at Greensboro

"My name is Matt Welhaf, I'm a 5th year PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. My study looks at how sustained attention measurement is impacted by task demands. Tasks that attempt to maximize sustained attention demands should better correlate with objective and subjective performance measures from "normal" sustained attention tasks compared to tasks that aim to minimize the demand on sustained attention."


Darren Hilliard



University of Bath

"Hi, I'm Darren. I'm currently Studying for my MRes in Advanced Quantitative Methods for Social Sciences. My study looks at how perceptions of income inequality affect people's subjective well-being."


Samuel Bond



Oxford Brookes University

"I'm Samuel Bond, a third year PhD student at Oxford Brookes University. My project explores the statistical learning mechanism in language acquisition. I develop artificial languages that have multiple, and contrasting, statistical properties. I then test which properties participants pick up on!"


Costanza Ruffini



University of Florence (IT)

"My name is Costanza Ruffini. I am a first year Psychology PhD student at the University of Florence, FORLILPSI (Education, Languages, Interculture, Literature and Psychology) Department. I am interested in studying Executive Functions in typical developmental children and in children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders. I believe that Gorilla is a great solution for remote collection of data in children."


Nicole Coaker

@ficusaurea



Universidad de Buenos Aires

"My name is Nicole Coaker. I am finishing my Biology degree at the University of Buenos Aires (equivalent to a MS) and working on my thesis at the Institute of Physiology, Molecular Biology and Neuroscience (IFIBYNE, CONICET). My research explores memory updating in familiar words and the role of memory reactivation in this process."


Iqra Arshad

@iqraarshadpsych



Royal Holloway, University of London

"My name is Iqra Arshad and I am a first-year PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. My research explores cognition in non-terrestrial gravity environments using a range of methods from cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology. Upon return, astronauts have reported an overwhelming sense of awe and wonder which often leads to prosocial attitudes, the so-called Overview Effect. My Gorilla study will focus on the Overview Effect using a visual adaptation paradigm."


Ashley Blake

@ashleyrblake



University of Birmingham

"My name is Ashley Blake and I am a 2nd year PhD Researcher at the University of Birmingham. My research investigates individual differences in children’s language acquisition. In particular, I would like to find out how the speed of automatization predicts differences in children’s linguistic ability both in typically developing children, and children with developmental language disorder."


Omid Ghasemi

@omid_rezaa11



Macquarie University

"My name is Omid Ghasemi and I am a second-year Ph.D. student in cognitive science at Macquarie University. My research investigates how people reason and how their reasoning interacts with their personal, scientific, and political beliefs."


Julianna Olah



King's College London

"Hi! I am Julianna Olah, a first-year Ph.D. student at Kings College London. I am conducting research on the identification and combination of acoustic and structural features of online collected speech which can effectively predict the later onset of a severe mental health condition, psychosis and screen people who are at the risk of developing it."


Valentina Vellani

@ValentinaVella9



University College London

"I'm Valentina Vellani, second year PhD student at the Affective Brain Lab, University College London. I am interested in exploring how valence influences information-processing using pharmacological, behavioral and neuroimaging techniques. "


Linda Geven

@lindageven



Leiden University

"Linda Geven is a legal psychologist, working as an assistant professor at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She investigates causes of wrongful convictions, with experimental work focusing on (false) confessions and deception detection. In this Gorilla study, she will investigate biased decision-making that may follow from the very first impression of a suspect."


Gwen Brekelmans

@GwenBrekel



University College London

"I’m an early career researcher in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at University College London. Generally, I work on how people learn to speak and understand second and foreign languages, and this particular project will attempt to replicate an important finding from the literature relating to the key role of variability in the language input that you’re learning from."


Adine A DeLeon

@adine_deleon



Texas State University

"I'm Adine DeLeon and I'm a first-year master's student at Texas State University. My thesis examines intentional design bias, or belief in purposeful creation, among children raised in secular or non-religious households."


Giulia Serino

@GiSerino



Birkbeck, University of London

"Hello, my name is Giulia. I am a first year PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. I am very interested in attention development. My project investigates the relationship between distraction and learning. In particular, I aim to study whether too much or too little distractibility interferes with the emergence of optimal learning skills during childhood."


Minho Hwang



UNIST

"I’m second year master degree student in human engineering at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology. My study looks at how the brain represents decision making about economic choice. Specifically, I study about how individual differently estimate value of each alternative option through different context (i.e., number of alternative option), and it can be explained by physiological measurement, like eye tracking data. My goal is to quantitatively explain how individual translate various dimension of information as value dimension."


Elena Benini

@ElenaBenini3



RWTH Aachen University

"Hi! I am Elena Benini, a second-year PhD candidate in cognitive and experimental psychology at RWTH Aachen University. My research focuses on how humans deploy their attention and select their actions in a multitasking setting. My project is inserted within the BRAC framework (Binding and Retrieval in Action Control), which assumes that compounds of perceptual features and actions are bound together and, subsequently, retrieved from memory. I aim to exploit two simple mechanisms, Binding & Retrieval, to explain well-established results in behavioural multitasking research. Thanks to Gorilla, I can extend the reach of my research, and test my hypotheses on a larger and more diverse online sample."


Tesni Galvin

@TesniGalvin



Swansea University

"My name is Tesni Galvin and I’m a second year PhD student in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Swansea University. My PhD project is investigating how Welsh-English bilingual adults use, represent and process grammatical gender in Welsh. We are also interested in whether any factors account for the differences observed between bilingual speakers."


Xiaoyun Chen

@XiaoyunChen4



Lancaster University

"I am Xiaoyun Chen, a third year phd student at Lancaster University. My PhD project is investigating the role of visual uncertainty on curiosity behaviours in infants and adults. More specifically, I am looking at whether curiosity triggered by uncertain information would affect learning in general."


Tim Joris Laméris

@timlameris



University of Cambridge

"My name is Tim Laméris and I am a PhD student in the Phonetics Lab at the University of Cambridge. I have always been fascinated by why adults struggle so much to successfully learn the sound system of a foreign language. In my current research, I investigate the acquisition of tones in a second language by adult learners. My aim is to find which individual learner 'tools', both linguistic (such as language background) and extralinguistic (such as musical experience, pitch sensitivity, and working memory) form the ideal 'toolkit' to learn these lexical tones. I do so by employing a number of behavioural experiments which I am able to run successfully on Gorilla.sc."


Jennifer Mills

@JenClaude



Royal Holloway, University of London

"I’m Jennifer Mills, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Royal Holloway, University of London. My study will investigate the effect of prosody on verbal sequence learning."


Phyllis Windsor



University of Stirling

"Hi, I'm Phyllis Windsor, I'm a former consultant clinical oncologist and football team doctor, now a second year PhD student at Stirling University, researching into how memory vividness interacts with confidence and accuracy, using natural scene photographs in a picture similarity experiment."


Yingzhao Chen



Michigan State University

"I am Yingzhao Chen. I am a third-year PhD student in the Second Language Studies Program at Michigan State University. My project examines the roles of frequency, first language and learning context in second language collocational processing. On Gorilla, I measure the reaction time of English learners in different learning environments to English collocations of various frequency and first language status, i.e., whether the collocations have counterparts in the first language."


Masayuki (Edward Masa Yuki) Hirata

@edwardhirata



University of Bath/University of Birmingham

"I am Masayuki Hirata, a MSc student at the University of Bath. I am also a member of the Applied Memory Lab in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. Our research project investigates whether we can improve people’s accuracy in discriminating between innocent and guilty suspects using a new interactive simultaneous lineup procedure that we developed. The project team includes Dr Heather Flowe, Dr Melissa Colloff, Laura Stevens, Dr Harriet Smith and Marlene Meyer."


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