February 2026

What did you do using Gorilla?

There were three papers in particular that benefited from this online approach. In Roark et al. (2021), Roark, Smayda et al. (2022), and Roark, Lehet, et al. (2022), we had already run one in-person experiment (separate ones for each of these papers) and reviewers asked for additional data in each case. This ended up working really well as online replications of the in-person data and revealed some really interesting patterns of both similarities and differences in in-person and online approaches that have made me highly confident in using online approaches since.

What Gorilla tools did you use in your study?

Questionnaire Builder and Task Builder.

What is you next project?

I'm continuing my line of research on multisensory learning and looking forward to using naturalistic stimuli to understand how people learn in more realistic scenarios. I'm interested in understanding how people learn and develop multisensory expertise, how they learn in social contexts, and how they learn in interactive and incidental learning contexts.

How did Gorilla make your life or research better, easier or faster?

Gorilla provides such an accessible on ramp for undergraduate and early graduate students to learn about experimental design. When I first learned in other programs, the learning curve was so much steeper and the resources were less helpful. Gorilla has made it so much easier to get undergraduates meaningfully involved in research and to kickstart graduate students in designing experiments on their own. This has been instrumental in helping me develop my lab as an Assistant Professor in Psychology at the CLEAR Lab, University of New Hampshire.

What real-world problem do you see that your research could impact?

I think my research has the potential to impact real-world learning problems. Much of my recent work has focused on how we learn in different sensory modalities, challenging common theoretical and experimental approaches that focus on a single modality. My research demonstrates that to understand how we learn in out complex and multisensory world, it's necessary to actually look at learning involving multiple senses. I think this could impact pedagogical approaches to involve more embodied and multisensory information in the learning process to improve learning outcomes.

What do you believe to be true that you cannot prove (yet)?

I love this question! I believe that embodied multisensory experiences are so ingrained in the human experience that sensory modality plays an underappreciated role in study of perception and cognition. This is a hot take but I believe that studying processes like attention, memory, and learning in a single modality may not be able to reveal fundamental mechanisms of human cognition and how cognition works in most real-world situations.

What is the most exciting piece of work or research you’ve ever done?

I am currently most excited about an ongoing project I have with my colleagues here at UNH - Lauren Ferguson and Michelle Fournet. This highly interdisciplinary project uses high-quality naturalistic recordings of whale sounds (collected by Michelle Fournet) to induce awe in participants. We are then interested in understanding how that sound-induced awe experience impacts emotion and well-being as well as how it may impact subsequent learning. I am enjoying working with my colleagues on this project that has the potential for real-world impact. It has made me appreciate the role of nature in our everyday lives and specifically how sound is a huge part of how we experience our natural world.

What were your concerns about taking your research online?

The first online study I ran was at the beginning of 2020 in response to COVID-19 related lockdowns. We needed some way to continue research online to continue our line of research. This was particularly important for me as I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh at the time.

What is the biggest advantage of online research methods?

The biggest advantage of online research methods is the ability to reach a wider range of people which increases the generalizability of our work. One of the ways this manifested in my own work is in the now published Xiong et al. (2026) study. This study was collected using Gorilla where collaboratorsnfrom the U.S. and Hong Kong were able to work seamlessly to co-create the experiment and collect data from native Mandarin speakers. This simply would not have been possible with other research methods. Gorilla made is so simple to collaborate and to run studies on individuals from different language backgrounds.

Would you recommend Gorilla to others? Why or why not?

Absolutely - Gorilla is accessible and immediately useful for research. The methods - including collecting low-level psychophysical measurements - are highly rigorous and trustworthy. I have been able to replicate many of my inperson studies online through Gorilla and the ease of its online interface has made it very straightforward to share materials and engage in truly collaborative science. Another story I have about this is Wesley Leong, a graduate student from UConn reached out to me to get access to my study materials (data and stimuli were already published) on Gorilla for a re-analysis he had done of my original study. We ended up collaborating on this project, with additional data collected on Gorilla. This was published as a proceedings paper in 2025 and we are preparing a full manuscript for submission.

Have you published any other studies using Gorilla?

Yes several with more projects in progress!

Dual learning systems in talker identification: the effects of language, accent, and feedback. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, Journal of Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 88(1), 37.

Auditory Category Learning in Children With Dyslexia. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 1–15.

Individual differences in working memory impact the trajectory of non-native speech category learning. PLOS ONE, 19(6),e0297917.

Auditory and visual category learning in children and adults. Developmental Psychology, 59(5), 963–975.

Stable, flexible, common, and distinct behaviors support rule-based and information-integration category learning. Npj Science of Learning, 8(1), 14.

Auditory and visual category learning in musicians and nonmusicians. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(3), 739–748.

The representational glue for incidental category learning is alignment with task-relevant behavior. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 48(6), 769–784.

Working memory relates to individual differences in speech category learning: Insights from computational modeling and pupillometry. Brain and Language, 222, 105010.

Comparing perceptual category learning across modalities in the same individuals Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28(3), 898–909.

Includes proceedings papers:
Modalityspecific mental imagery abilities are unrelated to modality-specific category learning. In D. Barner, N. R. Bramley, A. Ruggeri, & C. M. Walker (Eds.), Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 3756-3763). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Label similarity and stimulus similarity interact in categorization. In D. Barner, N. R. Bramley, A. Ruggeri, & C. M. Walker (Eds.), Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 5780-5786). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

And a paper led by a high-school student who I mentored in the Journal of Emerging Investigators: The influence of working memory on auditory category learning in the presence of visual stimuli. Journal of Emerging Investigators, 5, 9-Jan.

Follow my Bluesky for updates.