Experience
Work & research experience
A concise overview of my research roles. Open any entry for methods, projects, and details.
Intern — PECOG Lab, University of Potsdam
Apr 2026 – PresentPotsdam, Germany
Investigating the representational geometry of abstract concepts such as time through spontaneous eye movements during verbal fluency.
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Right now, as an intern in the PECOG Lab, I'm trying to recover the hidden geometry of abstract concepts like time from spontaneous eye movements during a verbal fluency task, where people name calendar items from a category as they come to mind. I want to understand how we keep track of time in our heads and what its cognitive map looks like.
To answer these questions, I built behavioral experiments in PsychoPy, and I'm now collecting pilot data.
Methods: PsychoPy · eye tracking · verbal fluency · behavioral experimentation
Research Assistant — PECOG Lab, University of Potsdam
June 2025 – Apr 2026Potsdam, Germany
Supported behavioral research across VaccineComm and BOUNCES through experiment programming, participant testing, study coordination, and data analysis.
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I worked as a research assistant at the Potsdam Embodied Cognition Group (PECOG), where I helped run behavioral experiments, programmed experimental tasks, recruited and managed participants, and worked with the resulting data.
VaccineComm — Public Health Collaboration
Sept 2025 – Dec 2025For four months, I helped with VaccineComm, a project studying how vaccine information can be communicated to support informed decisions. One part of the study presented participants with visualizations about vaccination and disease risk. I built an interactive web app to explore clearer ways of presenting those graphics, which the team later used as a basis for revising the survey. I also analyzed the survey data in R, from cleaning and restructuring the data to fitting linear mixed-effects models and examining the study hypotheses.
BOUNCES — Boundary Conditions of Conceptual Spaces
June 2025 – Apr 2026BOUNCES — Boundary Conditions of Conceptual Spaces is part of a DFG-funded project studying how we organize conceptual knowledge and how flexible those representations are. In the experiment I helped with, participants learned separate hierarchies based on two dimensions, such as swimming ability and grades, and later had to combine and reorganize what they had learned. The study asks whether people can infer relationships they were never directly taught, whether they represent this knowledge spatially, and how flexibly they can restructure that representation. I helped run the data collection: I scheduled participants, ran the three-session behavioral experiment, handled participant compensation, and made changes to the Python/PsychoPy experiment when needed.
Methods: PsychoPy · R · mixed-effects models · participant recruitment · behavioral data collection
Undergraduate Researcher — Bachelor's Thesis
Oct 2022 – Sept 2023Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Ahvaz, Iran
Studied associations between musical training, musical competence, and executive functions in adolescents.
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I chose my bachelor's thesis because I was interested in music and wanted to understand two related questions: whether practicing music is associated with differences in cognition, and whether cognitive abilities might also be related to musical competence. I focused on adolescents and looked at working memory, attention, and inhibitory control alongside measures of musical ability.
The project was also my first real introduction to computerized cognitive testing. I found the tasks myself, learned how to use them, and collected the data with adolescents. I wrote a Python script for processing the data and analyzed it in R. Part of this work later became a conference presentation comparing visual-spatial working memory in beginner and advanced music students at the 10th International Conference on Cognitive Science (ICCS 2024).
Methods: cognitive testing · Python · R · behavioral data collection