Emily Ward, PhD

Credentials: Department of Psychology (College of Letters and Science)

Position title: Senior Research Scientist, Health Economics & Outcomes Research at Spring Health

Keywords: Visual processing, perception, neuroimaging, machine learning

Education:
BA 2007, Biological Foundations of Behavior, Neuroscience, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA
PhD 2016, Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT

Research Interests:
Dr. Emily Ward’s lab explores the nature of human visual processing, with an emphasis on the ways in which high-level perception interacts with and constrains other processes in the mind. Some of the specific questions that they have explored are: What determines whether we become aware of something? What factors determine how accurately we perceive something? How do visual factors constrain what we remember? How does the brain transform representations, such as linking two states of an object, for example, before and after an object undergoes a physical state change? To address these topics, they use a combination of behavioral and functional neuroimaging methods, including both creating novel visual tasks and applying pattern analysis and machine learning to explore neural representations and transformation.