About

Hello! I’m Kumiko, a fourth-year undergraduate student double majoring in Cognitive Science and Computational and Applied Mathematics. I am an Undergraduate Researach Assistant in the Computational Affective and Social Neuroscience Laboratory, advised by Dr. Yuan Chang Leong.

Currently for my Cognitive Science honors thesis, I research how anxiety plays a role in how people encode information and whether the similarity of the reconstruction of semantics from brain activity evoked by naturalistic movies decrease with higher anxiety. I use multivariate neuroimaging (fMRI) and encoding models to study these questions.

I am broadly interested in how our emotions and past experiences affect our memory and perception, and what distinguishes human cognition from computational models. I am also interested in how semantic information is represented in the human brain, and exploring with encoding and decoding models.

More about me

I enjoy writing and producing songs in my free time about nostalgia, depression, existentialism, and futurism. I also enjoy creating websites.

My creative website: website

News

• June 2027 - expected to graduate from the University of Chicago with a B.A. with honors in Cognitive Science (Specialization in Psychology and Computer Science) and a B.S. in Computational and Applied Mathematics (Specialization in Machine Learning)
• September 2024 - started my research career as an undergraduate research assitant at the Computational Affective and Social Neuroscience Laboratory
• September 2023 - started undergraduate at the University of Chicago