Welcome!

We are all familiar with motor skill acquisition in the everyday, whether it be through cooking, driving, playing a sport, or playing a musical instrument. In my Ph.D. work, I studied how people acquire complex skills in video games. Under the supervision of Dr. John Anderson, I designed measures of cognitive and motor skill that account for the different aspects of sensorimotor learning in variants of the Space Fortress video game. I then investigated the neural correlates of skill acquisition with electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). My current research perspective on sensorimotor learning is inspired by my previous research training in music perception & cognition, and in music performance. Specifically, I am interested in uncovering the mechanisms of learning that are common across the domains of video games and music performance, and have thus focused my research on motor timing skills. From a neural perspective, one interesting brain structure that may play an important role in skill acquisition and in motor timing is the cerebellum.

As a postdoctoral scholar, I am expanding the study of sensorimotor learning mechanisms to the realm of health. I am interested in comparing behavioral and neural patterns across healthy controls and patient populations using behavioral, eye-tracking, EEG, and fMRI analyses. I am also interested in developing new computational models of skill acquisition in video games with prospective applications in rehabilitation.