Student: Jane Baker
Concentration: Computational Neuroscience
Lab: the Learning, Memory and Decision Lab
Faculty mentor: Matt Nassar
Thesis: For my honors thesis, I analyzed eye-tracking data from a visual search task to investigate how humans adjust their visual search strategies when faced with varying levels of environmental uncertainty. This project enhances our understanding of how the brain accumulates and processes evidence. What’s more, having a baseline for how people adapt their information-seeking strategies in high-uncertainty conditions can make it easier to identify when someone is struggling to process uncertainty and could help guide diagnostic approaches for conditions like obsessive compulsive disorder and schizophrenia.
Why I ❤️ the Open Curriculum: I took an education class called Social Psychology of Race, Class and Gender and a political science class called Gender, Slavery and Freedom. Taking classes like these made me aware of the mistreatment certain demographics face and how this can manifest in settings like academia and medicine. This shift in perspective has made me want to focus specifically on healthcare equity.
What’s next? I plan to contribute to the development of more accessible and equitable neurotechnology. Next year, I will be completing a fifth-year Master’s in Biomedical Engineering. This will serve as a bridge between my undergraduate research and my ultimate career goal: applying my Brown education to design neurotechnology that can be used by anyone who needs it, not just those who are able to afford it.