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Education:

BS (2017) Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Thesis: Brain Mechanisms for the Cognitive Effects of Narrative Persuasion

Fun Fact About Me:
I considered careers as a flash fiction writer, graphic designer, and skin care cosmetics product developer.

About Me

I am a 4th year Cognition & Brain Science Ph.D student, part of the Tech to Teaching program and Science & Technology in Society certification program. For a year before becoming a graduate student, I was CoNTRoL’s lab manager. I was also a practicum student at the Marcus Autism Center’s Educational Science Research Core, which ran an inclusive preschool that taught social communication and emotional regulation strategies rather than followed behavioral therapies. As an undergraduate, I was a research assistant for two years at CoNTRoL, where I completed my thesis on narrative persuasion as a part of UROP’s Research Option.

My research centers on how the human bodymind and its higher-level cognitive processes, such as action and task representation, evolves over time through the socially-organized changes we make to our world. My master’s thesis is on whether our tendency to understand other people, and even inanimate objects in certain contexts, as intentional agents is a form of biologically primary knowledge that predisposes us for social learning; and how the importance of social learning to survive in a constantly changing world necessitates hierarchical task files for cognition as opposed to a collection of stimulus-response associations.

Intricately related to my interdisciplinary approach are my interests in how scientists create knowledge, the role science plays in state-building, and abolitionist university studies.

Research Interests

Social cognitive neuroscience, science and technology in society (STS), human-world dialectical relationship, intentional stance, theory of mind, mentalizing, default mode network.

Awards

• President’s Fellowship, 2018-2022
• Herbert P. Haley Fellowship, 2018-2019
• Williams-Walls Life Science Award, April 2017

Publications & Presentations

• Schumacher, E. H., Cookson, S. L., Smith, D. M., Nguyen, T. V. N., Sultan, Z., Reuben, K. E., & Hazeltine, E. (2018). Dual-Task Processing With Identical Stimulus and Response Sets: Assessing the Importance of Task Representation in Dual-Task Interference. Frontiers in Psychology, 9(1031).