Rochelle Kaper

Hi! My name is Rochelle Kaper (she / her) and I am a 2nd year PhD student in Cognitive Sciences (concentration in Cognitive Neuroscience) at the University of California, Irvine, advised by Dr. Megan Peters in the Reflexion Lab. 

I am interested in using computational cognitive neuroscience approaches to understand how we adaptively learn and represent information under uncertainty, and how we evaluate our own learning and decision-making processes in doing so. Humans are capable of learning multiple spatiotemporal patterns in their environment through mere exposure, and can generalize this knowledge even without explicit feedback, which we refer to as structure learning. Our project investigates the extent to which the dynamics of structure learning under uncertainty rely on metacognition: the evaluation and error-monitoring of one's learning. We are interested in how the interaction of structure learning and metacognition unfolds over time, and whether differences in task design may play a role in this relationship. Check out our preprint! 

Before I began my PhD, I obtained my B.S. in Psychological Science (2023) and my M.S. in Cognitive Science (2024) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. For my Master's Project, co-advised by Dr. Chris Sims and Dr. Alicia Walf, I examined the effects of acute stress and state anxiety on visual working memory and decision-making. Check out our paper here!