Steve Franconeri, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator
[Personal homepage]

Steve Franconeri is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Northwestern. His research is on visual attention, visual structure representation, number perception, and object tracking. In his spare time he plays squash, tennis, and ultimate frisbee. His lab is accepting research volunteers, independent study students, and workstudy programmers. Please contact him if you are interested.

Jason Scimeca
Lab Manager

Jason is a technical research assistant in the lab, i.e. the lab manager. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 2008 with a BA in Psychology and Neuroscience. He is broadly interested in cognitive neuroscience and is planning to apply to graduate school at some point. When not fiddling with Matlab or Experiment Builder, Jason can usually be found at the gym or playing Mario Kart.

Brian Levinthal
NIH Postdoctoral Fellow

Brian completed his PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009, where his research focused primarily on visual attention, and specifically the role that expectations play in visual search tasks. Brian will be pursuing a variety of topics including an attempt to determine whether you can really pay attention to two things at once. Outside of the science factory, Brian spends his time playing musical instruments, walking along Lake Michigan, and commanding small fictional armies via mouse and keyboard.

Heeyoung Choo
Graduate Student

Heeyoung recently graduated Yonsei University (in Seoul, South Korea) with a M.A. in Psychology. Her academic interests involve selective attention, cognitive control, and mechanisms of visual selection. When she is not studying, she enjoys listening to music, reading novels, or making skins for her personal website.

Stacey Parrott
Graduate Student

Stacey recently graduated from Lake Forest College with a Bachelors of Arts. in Psychology and Spanish. Her interests encompass the factors that influence spatial representations, and how cognitive maps are used in visual information processing. Additionally, Stacey has been known to throw pens, laugh a lot, and plan social gatherings for her vision lab mates. Other than studying, Stacey enjoys community service work, reading, and exercise.

Yangqing (Lucie) Xu
Graduate Student

Lucie graduated from Lawrence University with a B.A. in Psychology. Her research interests include mechanisms of visual attention, visual illusions, & number perception. Outside of Psychology, Lucie loves dancing, making Chinese paper-cuts, and playing table tennis.

Ilana Feldman
Research associate

Ilana just received her B.A. in Psychology from Kenyon College in 2009. As a new research associate, she is currently studying the perceptual element of social grouping. She eventually wants to go to grad school for clinical psychology. In her spare time, Ilana enjoys creative writing, art, and movies.

Sarah Helseth
Research associate

Sarah is a recent graduate who hails from Wilmette, IL. She earned a bachelor's degree in French and Psychology with honors, and a minor in Marketing from Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio. Sarah's current mission is to see how many concurrent tasks you need to give a subject before they really, really, hate you.

Hyunyoung Park
Research associate

Hyunyoung graduated from University of Delaware in May as a Mass Communication and Psych double-major in undergrad. She became interested in visual perception and is thinking about graduate school to study visual perception. She enjoys watching movies and listening to music while not studying.

Jessica Roth
Senior thesis student

Jessica is a senior in WCAS majoring in Cognitive Science. Jessica is studying the mental coding of visual relational structure. Upon graduation, she plans on entering an MD/PhD program in neuroscience. Outside of the lab, she enjoys spending time with family and friends, cooking, and singing

Sumeeth Jonathan
Undergrad Rockstar

Sumeeth is a Junior at Northwestern University. His academic interests include Biomedical Engineering, International Studies and Cognitive Science, and is in his second year in the lab working with the mechanisms of visual object tracking. In his free time, Sumeeth focuses his energies primarily on coffee, Chipotle and MATLAB. Sumeeth could simulate you in C++.

Lauren Kahn
Undergrad Rockstar

Lauren is an undergraduate junior at Northwestern University majoring in Cognitive Science and Math. In the lab, she studies how spatial relations are mentally represented. Using eyetracking, she studies how these representations are formed. Outside the lab, she spends her time singing barbershop, singing in a rock band, thinking a little too much about cognitive science, and pondering life while sitting by the lake.

Claudia Lau
Undergrad Rockstar

Claudia knows her left from her right better than anyone. Claudia's interests include eyetracking, face perception, and the perception of object continuity.

Roxana Malene
Undergrad Rockstar

Roxana is a transfer student, soon to be senior in WCAS, where she is enjoying classes toward a major in psychology and a minor in cognitive sciences. She hates P07 but P08 is growing on her. When she is not studying vision and attention processes in the lab, she finds herself cruising along the lake on roller skates, enjoying a good movie at the MusicBox, or skiing where I find the snowy hills!

Derek Tam
Undergrad Rockstar

Derek is a Cognitive Science Sophomore in WCAS with interests in medicine, photography, and drumming. Derek is the lab's master of visual grouping processes, and can often be observerd grouping objects in the lab in his spare time.

Scott Yasinow
Undergrad Rockstar

Scott is a senior psychology major in WCAS. He is applying to medical schools and he hopes to fulfill his longtime dream of becoming an ophthalmologist. His projects in the lab focus on visual attention and crowding. Outside of research, Scott is very involved with his fraternity and with Dance Marathon.