I am a Ph.D. student in Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working in the Cognitive Decision Making Lab under the supervision of Dr. Jared Hotaling. My research focuses on understanding how individuals make experience-based decisions—decisions shaped by prior encounters and personal experiences rather than external information or theoretical knowledge. Currently, I am on a leave of absence to address personal matters, but I remain actively engaged in my academic and research pursuits.
I graduated from Carleton College in 2022 with a B.A. in both Cognitive Science and Philosophy. During my time at Carleton, I worked in the Language and Cognition Research Lab under the supervision of Dr. Mija Van Der Wege, where I contributed to research examining how generational differences influence the perception of communication effectiveness, particularly in situations involving ambiguous statements.
In 2021, I was selected as a McNair Scholar at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where I conducted research on the effects of preview advertisements on attitudes about full-length advertisements under the guidance of Dr. William Hedgcock and with the support of Sangmin Kim.
The integrative exercise, or "comps", is a capstone project that serves as a culminating experience for seniors at Carleton College. It offers students the opportunity to engage deeply with their major through an independent or collaborative research endeavor, demonstrating competence in their field and integrating the skills and knowledge acquired during their college studies.
For my Cognitive Science comps, I conducted a literature review on the conjunction fallacy and its relationship with religiosity, synthesizing research from 1977 to 2021. I examined how religiosity might influence the likelihood of committing conjunction fallacies, revealing conflicting findings in the literature. Additionally, I explored the broader impact of religiosity on intuitive thinking, dual-process theory, and human reasoning. This work integrated insights from cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, and theology, offering a comprehensive analysis of these interconnected topics.
For my Philosophy comps, I explored the liar paradox by proposing two solutions: one using fuzzy logic and the other introducing a third truth value to traditional bivalent logic. I also examined how both solutions are challenged by revenge paradoxes, ultimately demonstrating that neither approach successfully resolves the liar paradox due to their inherent limitations.