Members

Nick is interested in how the brain learns to attend relevant information and control itself to prevent distraction. He received his PhD from the University of New Mexico with Dr. Eric Ruthruff and completed an NIH F32 postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Davis with Dr. Steven Luck. He has received many awards for his research, including an NSF Career Award and an Early Career Award from Psychonomic Society. He is the area director of the Cognition and Neuroscience graduate program at Mizzou. He is a fellow of Psychonomic Society and the Association for Psychological Science. He is also currently an associate editor at Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition and Each summer, he leads an NSF-funded workshop on R Programming for Psychology and Neuroscience which teaches junior scientists how to analyze data from cognitive tasks. In his free time, he enjoys goofing around with his daughter, photography, and guitar.

[website] [email] [CV] [bluesky]

Jin is a postdoc in the lab who began in 2024. She completed her Ph.D. at Washington University with Dr. Richard Abrams, where she had an innovative program of research focused on what strategies can be used to ignore salient-and-distracting stimuli. As a postdoc, she is continuing to study these topics while gaining additional experience using advanced techniques, such as EEG and eye tracking. Much of her current investigates how spreading attention can influence capture by salient stimuli. She is also interested in how search strategies can influence attentional control. In her free time, she likes to cook and make beautiful oil paintings!

[email] [webpage] [bluesky]

Steeven is a postdoctoral student who began in the lab in Fall 2026. He completed his Ph.D. at the Université de Rouen Normandie in France with Dr. François Maquestiaux. Much of his work focuses on divided attention and how people learn to perform multiple tasks at once. His recent work has challenged the leading theory of dual-tasking, called the central bottleneck model.  He won a competitive Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Missouri, where he aims to learn to use event-related potentials (ERPs) and eye-tracking to further investigate new questions about dual-task performance. 

[email]

Yue is a Ph.D. student who began in Fall 2024. She completed her master's degree at Guangzhou University in China with Dr. Shimin Fu. As a masters student, she obtained a competitive scholarship to conduct a visiting project with Dr. Gaspelin at Mizzou. Nick enjoyed working with her so much that he asked her to pursue a PhD in his lab. Yue has an innovative line of research that aims to understand how we can learn to prevent distraction. She has many cool papers, including one in Psychological Science, showing that distraction might actually help to train attention to ignore future distractions. Her hobbies include drawing, making bubble tea, and shopping at Trader Joe's.

[email]

Yakup is an incoming Ph.D. student begins Fall 2026. He previously studied as a master's student Sabancı University in Turkey with Dr. Eren Günseli. Yakup's research has used ERP measures of working memory and attention—such as the CDA and N2pc—to understand how long-term memories can influence working memory representations. As a graduate student, he is interested in understanding how visual distraction might influence working memory representations.