PhD Students

Time Perception, Numerosity, Attention, Memory, Psychophysics

Candice (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Cognitive & Behavioral Neuroscience program within the Psychology Department at George Mason University, and conducts research in Dr. Martin Wiener’s spatial, temporal, action, representation (STAR) lab. She is also a founding member of The UXR Lab — a global research and training community of 200+ university-trained academics who leverage their skills to provide user experience (UX) research services for non-profits, startups, and small businesses in preparation for a career shift into industry.

At Mason, Candice's work includes elucidating the neural mechanisms involved in human time and space perception, and magnitude processing as a pathway to understanding perceptual processing and multisensory integration. In the lab, she uses a variety of cognitive neuroscience tools: eye tracking, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), electroencephalography (EEG), functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), and psychophysics. Different techniques are often used to enhance their power, i.e., simultaneous fMRI-EEG or TMS-EEG.

Prior to attending George Mason, she earned an M.A. in Psychology Research from Texas State University where she also taught Research Methods as a full-time Lecturer of Psychology. Her passion for psychological research began as an undergraduate at Northern Kentucky University, where she graduated Cum Laude with a B.A. in Psychological Science while minoring in Philosophy. While at NKU, she was inducted into the international honor societies for psychology (Psi Chi) and philosophy (Phi Sigma Tau).

Why study cognitive processing interactions between magnitudes and how?

1. We know that looking at different numbers (or quantities) of items alters the way we experience time.
2. However, there is still a lot we do not know about how observing these numerosities influences our ability to time events and make time-related decisions.
3. Therefore, Candice's scientific investigations aim to disentangle the neural mechanisms involved in processing the magnitude domains of numerosity and time, including how and when numerosity-time interactions occur. To do this, she plans to simultaneously record ocular behaviors using eye-tracking methods, and decision-making behaviors during the performance of specialized tasks related to judgments about time (e.g., short or long passage of time) and judgments about numerosity (e.g., few or many numbers of dots presented in an array).

Simply put, Candice studies how looking at different numbers of things changes the way our brains experience and use time.