Past Studies: How Participants Have Helped Advance Brain Science

Curious about what we’ve worked on before? This page highlights past studies from our lab that have helped us better understand how the brain supports attention, emotion, and learning & memory. These studies are no longer enrolling new participants. Some are fully completed, while others are in the data analysis phase. We are deeply grateful to everyone who volunteered their time and energy to participate in these studies. Your contributions have been essential to advancing our understanding of the brain and behavior. Science depends on people like you—thank you for being part of the discovery process.

Sips and Shapes (the original)

This study investigated how the brain responds when people repeatedly experience a specific visual cue (like a shape) followed by a small sip of a beverage—sometimes alcohol, sometimes not. We were interested in how these repeated pairings might influence both self-reported impressions and brain activity. Participants completed simple tasks while we recorded their brain responses using EEG and MRI. Our goal is to identify how these brain responses may relate to risk or resilience in the context of substance use. While enrollment is now closed, we are actively analyzing the data, and this work has already informed several ongoing studies in the lab.