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December 4, 2025
Cognitive Psychology Students at Fall Research Symposium
Super proud of the students in the first iteration of the Cognitive Psychology Research, Scholarship, and Creative Inquiry course! In the span of a single semester, the students gained hands-on experience with the complete research process from designing novel memory experiments, to collecting data from real participants, to statistically analyzing and interpreting their own results, to writing journal-style research papers in which they connected their findings to cognitive theory. Five teams of amazing students presented their research today at the Fall Student Research Symposium, and absolutely crushed the competition with their cognitive psychology expertise!
November 22, 2025
Psychonomics & MathPsych
Honored for the opportunity to present the QuantCog Lab’s research at Psychonomics in Denver, CO! Our work on cognitive flexibility and aging was presented at a fantastic satellite symposium on Computational Perspectives on Information Integration held by the Society for Mathematical Psychology, and our work on the memory limitations of selective attention was presented at the main Psychonomics conference.
September 30, 2025
Project funded by Army Research Institute
The QuantCog Lab has been awarded $125,000 from the Army Research Institute for an exciting project, Computationally Decoding Gaze-based Information Sampling to Support Adaptation in Dynamic Learning Environments!
August 6, 2025
Welcome, Sandys!
I am pleased to welcome a new PhD student to the lab: Sandys Ayuumah! Upon earning a Masters degree in Psychology and Education from Mississippi State University, Sandys has joined the Quant Cog Lab to lend his expertise to our work investigating the mechanisms of active learning and student decisions to balance time and effort when competing their coursework. Welcome to the lab, Sandys!
July 31, 2025
Modeling work presented at CogSci
The QuantCog Lab presented two projects at this year’s CogSci in San Francisco! Special thanks and congratulations to superstar USU undergraduate students Jared Vance, Ethan Bardsley, and Cole Francis for their work on these projects, especially Jared for giving a standout poster presentation–speaking at an international conference is a major achievement! Our papers can be found in the conference’s annual proceedings issue: [partial encoding] and [aging and inhibition]; presentation recordings can be found on the underline platform.
July 16, 2025
Paper submitted on the mechanisms of deep encoding
In new work titled “Early uncertainty during learning induces elaborate processing,” we use eye-tracking measures to tackle a decades-old point of contention within Craik and Lockhart’s (1972) Levels of Processing theory: what’s “deep” about deep processing? This work features the gaze-based regression stylings of Dr. Kevin Darby from Florida Atlantic University, and eye-tracking data that was expertly collected by a fabulous team of undergraduates at USU!
May 30, 2025
Cognitive Psychology course receives RSCI status
Dr. Emily Weichart’s advanced undergraduate Cognitive Psychology course (PSYC 4420) has been granted the prestigious Research, Scholarship, and Creative Inquiry Intensive Course designation from the USU Office of Research! In this course, students learn how to think like a scientist and gain hands-on experience coding their own experiments, collecting real data from participants, and interpreting their results within the vast theoretical context of cognitive psychology. PSYC 4420 is the first course in the Department of Psychology to earn this designation, and I’m excited to see what students discover!
April 20, 2025
Consensus modeling paper in press at AMPPS
We are honored to be part of the illustrious team of scientists from all over the world who put together a practical resource for designing experiments for evidence accumulation modeling. The paper, “An expert guide to planning experimental tasks for evidence-accumulation modeling,” is now in press at Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, and can be found here. Special thanks and congratulations to project leaders Drs. Russell Boag, Reilly Innes, and Birte Forstmann from the University of Amsterdam and Dr. Scott Brown from the University of Newcastle!
February 15, 2025
QuantCog Lab joins forces with the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center
The QuantCog Lab is now a proud affiliate of the Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia Research Center (ADRC), a collaboration of researchers in neuroscience, counseling, health, biology, and more with a shared goal of improving outcomes for people affected by Alzheimer’s. Check out the amazing work being done by Director Dr. Beth Fauth and all of the ADRC affiliates here! We at the QuantCog Lab are excited to bring our cognitive and computational expertise to this impactful initiative, and discover new routes for identifying pathological decline.
January 27, 2025
TWO new submissions on partial encoding and inhibition
I am thrilled to share the news of two new submissions! The first is titled “Gaze Insights into Partially-Encoded Representations of Objects and Categories“! This work leverages computational approaches to investigate eye-tracking patterns during learning as a way to measure memory encoding. Special thanks to USU undergraduate Jared Vance and Dr. Kevin Darby, PI of the Lifespan Cognition Lab at Florida Atlantic University, for their contributions to this work! Keep an EYE out for our paper!
The second is titled “The Asymmetric Effects of Aging on Between- and Within-Trial Timescales of Inhibition,” and provides an exciting avenue for early detection of age-related pathology. This work features contributions from USU undergraduates Ethan Bardsley and Cole Francis, as well as Dr. Per Sederberg, PI of the Computational Memory Lab at the University of Virginia!
December 5, 2024
2024 Fall Student Research Symposium
Undergraduate researcher Ethan Bardsley did an awesome job of representing the QuantCog Lab at USU’s Fall Student Research Symposium! His presentation, entitled “GLANCE: A novel approach to understanding cognitive health in aging and disease,” demonstrated the power of objective, task-based assessments for quantifying age-related changes in attentional control. Task-based measures of cognitive performance, such as those provided by the Global-Local Attentional Control Evaluation (GLANCE), could be the future of early detection of a range of neurological disorders.
November 19, 2024
Department “Lab Spotlight” honors the QuantCog Lab
The QuantCog Lab was selected for the USU Psychology Department Newsletter’s “Lab Spotlight” segment in the November issue! Check out a great article on our upcoming projects here.
November 14, 2024
New instructional EEG resource from the QuantCog Lab
The QuantCog Lab contributed a video on The Science of EEG to an innovative, accessible, online resource for students who are interested in behavioral neuroscience. Developed by Dr. Elizabeth Kirby (The Ohio State University) and freely available on OpenStax, Introduction to Behavioral Neuroscience is an interactive textbook and compilation of methods videos made by experts in biology, psychology, and neuroscience. The full resource is available here and the direct link to the QuantCog Lab’s video (located in Appendix A: Methods) is here!
October 24, 2024
Paper submitted on the mechanisms of attention decline in healthy aging
We present a new task and modeling framework to evaluate between- and within-trial attentional control! In this first presentation of the Global-Local AtteNtional Control Evaluation (GLANCE), we find that learning deficits in older adults are explained by impaired error-related memory suppression. See our preprint here, featuring USU undergraduate Cole Francis and Dr. Per Sederberg, PI of the Computational Memory Lab at the University of Virginia!
September 20, 2024
Research Catalyst grant proposal funded
The Quantified Cognition Lab has been awarded a Research Catalyst grant from the Utah State University Office of Research for an integrative project, entitled “The search for knowledge: Impacts of information search strategies on learning and neurophysiology“!
May 31, 2024
QuantCog Lab at CEMS
Dr. Emily Weichart will be presenting the lab’s recent work to explore partially-encoded stimulus representations and their impact on decision-making at the annual Context and Episodic Memory Symposium in Philadelphia, PA. Her talk is entitled: Gaze as a Direct Input to Encoding Structure in Models of Human Learning.
May 19, 2024
Connecting research to the classroom
People think they know how learning works, but some of the most commonly held beliefs are, in fact, misconceptions. At USU’s 2024 eLearnX conference on interaction in distance learning, Dr. Emily Weichart will deliver a Pedagogy Primer on The Cognitive Science of Learning. She will address what the latest research tells us about how we learn, covering topics like the physical brain structure and how it relates to theories of memory, retrieval practice, event segmentation, metacognition, and feedback-based learning.
January 20, 2024
Paper in press at Psychological Review
In a new paper titled “‘The eyes are the window to the representation’: Linking gaze to memory precision and decision weights in object discrimination tasks“, we present a novel direct input modeling approach for investigating gaze correlates of novel learning. Our findings reveal that selective attention during learning imposes constraints on the information that is available if the environment suddenly changes. Check out the paper here! Special thanks to the project’s senior authors from Ohio State University: Dr. Brandon Turner, PI of the Model-based Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, and Dr. Vladimir Sloutsky, PI of the Cognitive Development Lab!
November 17, 2023
An interview with the PI
Dr. Emily Weichart is the newest faculty member of USU’s Brain and Cognition Specialization. Her research investigates the connection between perception, memory, and decision making with the broader goal of understanding how these processes collectively shape knowledge and guide human actions. Read an interview with Dr. Weichart here.
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