Carnegie Mellon University

Grad News

As the Grad PR, my mission is to update the department on recent news & events that happen to graduate students. I will thus be providing information on the latest research milestones and achievements of Psychology graduate students, and will keep everyone posted throughout the year.

December & January | February & MarchArchive of 2024 News

February & March

Spring has officially sprung — and so have our students’ accomplishments. It’s April Fools’ Day… so is this newsletter a prank? Only one way to find out — read on and see for yourself. 

Paper Submissions & Publications

  • Yeung, J., Luo, A. F., Sarch, G., Henderson, M. M., Ramanan, D., & Tarr, M. J. (2025). Reanimating Images using Neural Representations of Dynamic Visual Stimuli.
  • Cash, T., Lin, T. J., Lee, H. J., Kim, S., Anderman, E., Cha, W., Liu, X., & Wen, Z. (R & R). School well-being during the Covid-19 pandemic: A study of academic motivation, need satisfaction, and school liking among gifted and non-identified early adolescents.
  • Cash, T., Oppenheimer, D., Pensky, A. C. (R & R). You’ve got AI friend in me: LLMs as collaborative learning partners.
  • Chroneos, M. Z., Behrmann M., Mayo, J. P. (under review). Bidirectional and Asymmetric Smooth Pursuit Deficits in Childhood Hemispherectomy Patients. 
  • Cash, T., & Oppenheimer, D. (under review). Investigating resource-rational strategic allocation of metacognitive resources in multi-attribute choice decisions.
  • Yunusova, A., Huang, C., Price, S., Joshi, K., Dutcher, J. M., Brown, K. W., Villalba, D. K., Tumminia, M. J., Creswell, K. G., Cohen, S., & Creswell, J. D. (under review). Depression trajectories and their associations with academic performance and sleep patterns among first year college students.

Conference Presentations & Talks

  • Julia Conti submitted a paper to present at, "What's going on? Surprising limitations in relational rule learning" at the Cognitive Science meeting this July in San Francisco, CA.
  • Asal Yunusova presented a poster, "Digital Mindfulness Training for Late Adolescents with IBS" at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine. 
A student with their poster

Professional Development

  • Asal Yunusova was awarded the Herb Simon Graduate Student Teaching Award.
Asal Yunusova with her award
  • Fiona Horner received a summer internship with Dexcom, a maker of continuous glucose monitors for people with diabetes to be a part of their behavioral science team!

Other News

  • Trent Cash has accepted a postdoctoral position in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo!


Congratulations to everyone for their achievements so far this semester. Happy Beginning of Spring!

P.S. It's April 2nd now. No pranks! Hope you had a happy April Fool's :)

December & January

Happy February and welcome to the first newsletter of 2025! I hope the New Year is off to a great start and that you’re settling in smoothly for the Spring semester. Below you’ll find highlights of our graduate students’ recent accomplishments, please join me in congratulating them on their achievements!

New Publications

  • Horner, F. S., Helgeson, V. S. (in press). Glucose in the dynamic psychosocial environment: Findings from adolescents with type 1 diabetes. Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine (previously Psychosomatic Medicine).
  • Horner, F. S., Helgeson, V. S. (in press). Psychosocial predictors of short-term blood glucose among people with diabetes: A narrative review. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 1-23. 
  • Oszczapinska, U., Park, S., Qiu, Y., Nance, B., Julien, M., & Heller, L. M. (in press).The impact of disgusting sounds on pupil diameter of misophonic and non-misophonic listeners.  Psychophysiology.
  • Blauch, N. M., Plaut, D. C., Vin, R., and Behrmann, M. (in press). Individual variation in the functional lateralization of human ventral temporal cortex: Local competition and long-range coupling, Imaging Neuroscience.
  • Granovetter, M. C., Maallo, A. M. S., Ling, S., Robert, S., Patterson, C. and Behrmann, M. (2024). Functional Resilience of the Neural Visual Recognition System Post-Pediatric Occipitotemporal Resection, iScience, 27, 111440.

Articles Under Review

  • Xie, Y., Chin, B. N., & Feeney, B. C. (under review). Links Between Discrimination and Sleep Quality: The Mediating Role of Negative Affect. Social and Personality Psychology Compass.
  • Mitala, J., Jakubiak, B. K.,  Xie, Y., & Feeney, B.C. (under review). Yours, Mine, and Ours: Sense of Purpose as a Dyadic Phenomenon in Romantic Relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
  • Robert, S., Granovetter, M. C., Ling., S., & Behrmann, M. (under review). Space- and object-based attention in patients with a single hemisphere following childhood resection. Scientific Reports.

Grant Submissions

Asal Yunusova submitted a F31 Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award titled, "The effects of mindfulness on gut microbiome in patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome" this past December.

Conference Presentations

  • Kulshrestha, K.,  Dedhe, A. M., Piantadosi, S. T., & Cantlon, J. F. (2025). Hierarchical Structure Generation in Pre-School Children and Adults in Two Ecologically-Valid Tasks. Poster accepted at 39th National Conference on Undergraduate Research.
  • Karishma Kulshrestha is an undergraduate student mentored by Abhishek Dedhe and, under his mentorship, she had a poster accepted for the National Conference on Undergraduate Research Conference in April and she won a Small Undergraduate Research Grant (SURG) from CMU as well.  
  • Jacob Yeung participated in the French American Doctoral Exchange (FADEx) this January, in which he visited several French institutions and presented his work on motion decoding and video reanimation from fMRI (see the arXiv manuscript).

CMU Trainees at the July 2024 Cognitive Science Society Conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Pictured are members of the Cantlon Lab plus a special guest (RC). (Left to right): Marissa Laws, Caroline Kaicher, Ricky Choi, Teoman S. Ozaydin, Abhishek Dedhe.

Other News

  • Jacob Yeung successfully completed his PNC First Year Milestone oral presentation in December.
  • Abhishek Dedhe was covered in a Dietrich College news story which showcased his independent, volunteer research on pandemic preparedness in Pune.
  • Yuxi Xie has a job offer for an Assistant Professor position at the University of Macau and has been very productive in her research, finishing collection of all of her dissertation data, which was a labor intensive feat. 


Congratulations to everyone for their many achievements! If this newsletter has missed any exciting news, please send it along for the next edition. Happy Spring Semester!