People

Minda Lab 2024 left to right: Dr. Minda, Anthony Cruz, Chelsea McKenzie, Priya Kalra, Madeline Bloomberg

Lab Director John Paul Minda

Department of Psychology
Western Institute for Neuroscience
Western University
London Ontario Canada N6A 5C2
email jpminda @ uwo.ca
tel 519 661-2111 ext 84689
fax 519 661-3961

Current Lab Members

Priya Kalra, PhD — BrainsCAN postdoctoral fellow

Dr. Kalra studies implicit learning—that is, learning without effort or awareness of what has been learned. There is increasing evidence that developing expertise or fluency in these domains involves not only the accumulation of information, but changes in the way that information is represented. Dr. Kalra works with Dr. Minda, Dr. Laura Batterink, Dr. Marc Joanisse and used a combination of behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging techniques to characterize these shifts.

Bailey Brashears, MSc

Bailey is a PhD student studying cognition and memory within the Minecraft framework. She has also carried out research on category learning and feature naming.

Brashears, B., & Minda, J. P. (2020). The Effects of Feature Verbalizablity on Category Learning. In S. Denison., M. Mack, Y. Xu, & B.C. Armstrong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gfh4a

Anthony Cruz, MSc

Google Scholar | LinkedIn | Personal Webpage

Anthony is a PhD candidate examining how people learn best, especially in regards to inferential learning. Much of his work uses a smartphone-based, ecologically valid artificial category learning paradigm. In his ongoing dissertation research, he explores how and why metacognitive monitoring impacts learning. Anthony approaches his work using a mix of behavioral and computational methods.

Anthony is currently the Vice-President Academic of Western’s Society of Graduate Students. Prior to this, he was the Managing Editor of GradCast, the Society of Graduate Students’ official radio show and podcast. Listen to him talk about his research here! Before joining the Minda Lab at Western, he received his BA in Mathematics and Psychology from Ohio University.

Minda, J. P., Roark, C. L., Kalra, P., & Cruz, A. (2024). Single and multiple systems in categorization and category learning. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00336-7

Cruz, A., & Minda, J. P. (2024). Was That My Cue? Reactivity to Category-Level Judgments of Learning. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46(0). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0nr5974b

Cruz, A., & Minda, J. P. (2024). The spacing effect in remote information-integration category learning. Memory & Cognition. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-024-01569-w

Chelsea McKenzie

Google Scholar | Personal Webpage

Chelsea is a second-year Psychology MSc student studying the conceptual structure of cities to better understand how people think and reason about where they live. She is also studying the effects of culture on category learning and categorization.

McKenzie, C. M. (2022). Exploring the Conceptual Structure of the City [Bachelor’s thesis, Brescia University College, completed under the supervision of Dr. John Paul Minda]. Western Libraries Scholarship at Western. https://bit.ly/3RxRY2E 

Ruiz Pardo, A. C., McKenzie, C. M., & Khemani, N (2023). Bridging the WEIRD Gap in Category Learning: Exploring an Online-Based Solution. PsyArXiv. http://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/hcedv

Madeline Bloomberg

LinkedIn | Google Scholar | Personal Webpage

Madeline is a second-year Psychology MSc student studying individual differences in category learning specifically in neurodivergent populations. She is also interested in studying what factors contribute to processing categories using a prototype approach vs. an exemplar approach.

Collaborators

Lab Alumni