I love combining my passion for AI and design with my background in psychology.
Studying psychology helped me become a more empathetic designer and fueled my interest in designing AI for social good, specifically for causes related to mental health, disability, and child safety.
Below ↓ are some of my selected works in psychological research. They include experiments, observational studies, meta-analyses, and surveys.
Building Rapport Between Human And Machine
EXPERIMENT
This work describes our human-centered design for our conversational movie recommendation agent, which explains its decisions as humans would. After exploring and analyzing a corpus of dyadic interactions, we developed a computational model of explanations. We then incorporated this model in the architecture of a conversational agent and evaluated the resulting system via a user experiment.
fine motor skills in children
OBSERVATIONAL STUDY
To understand the development and acquisition of fine motor skills in children, I asked: Is there a difference in the way children in preschool and kindergarten learn how to handle small objects? The exploration of this guiding question will shed light on how children learn, through experience, the most efficient way to grasp and manipulate objects.
Sense of self in autism spectrum disorder
META-ANALYSIS
In this paper, the sense of self in a person with ASD is discussed through the synthesis and description of several studies conducted by social psychologists interested in this domain.
The effect of science comprehension education on children and adults’ scientific reasoning
EXPERIMENT, SURVEY
This study aims to examine how different types of science education affects people’s scientific reasoning and belief-updating practices. It explores the following question: What is the effect of different types of science education on adults’ scientific reasoning and belief-updating?
language development in children
OBSERVATIONAL STUDY
To understand language development in children, I asked: Is there a difference in the language skills of children in preschool and kindergarten, with respect to syntax, gesturing, comprehension, and production? The exploration of this guiding question will shed light on how children learn, through observation and guidance, basic language skills.
alternative forms of grammar instruction
META-ANALYSIS
There is much debate around whether traditional methods of grammar instruction are as effective as alternative forms of instruction. This paper synthesizes several research papers on alternative methods of teaching grammar so that teachers are able to make an educated decision on which method is best for their classroom.
Indian-American Bicultural Identity Integration and Cultural Transmission
SURVEY
I realized that there is a prevalent gap in cultural research exploring how Indian-American integrate in American society but also they way in which their perception of their biculturalism would affect how much of their Indian culture they would choose to pass on. The research question I explored in this study was: How does an Indian-American’s perception of the compatibility of their two cultures affect the amount of Indian culture they choose to pass on to future generations?
Exploring Self-focus as an Explanation for the Gender Differences of Stress on Empathy
EXPERIMENT
In this study, we wanted to understand whether self-focus is the cause of the gender differences of stress on empathy. Past studies have shown that women are more empathetic than men, and that women show a greater decrease in levels of empathy under stressful situations. Other studies have shown that women have greater amounts of self-focused thoughts and behaviors than men. We were curious whether the cause for the change in empathy levels was a direct result of the differences in self-focus between men and women.