The Language Research Center is the “research home” for the graduate students and postdocs advised by our core scientists. Most of the graduate students conducting research are in the Ph.D. program in the Psychology department. Their interests span a wide variety of interdisciplinary fields that represent the future directions of the LRC, including behavior, cognition, and neuroscience.
Matt Babb
Matt received his B.S. in Biology from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. He is broadly interested in how animals make decisions within more socially relevant contexts. His specific interests include understanding prosocial behavior, how non-human animals react to unequal outcomes, how these behaviors influence decision-making, and the relationship that hormones have to all of these topics. In the past, he worked on a range of species including, tufted capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella), beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas), and loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta). In addition to his research, Matt is proficient in both Python and R programming languages and have a wealth of knowledge on GLMM statistical models.
Recent Publication:
Davis, A. L., Babb, M. H., Lowe, M. C., Yeh, A. T., Lee, B. T., & Martin, C. H. (2019). Testing Darwin’s hypothesis about the wonderful venus flytrap: marginal spikes form a “horrid prison” for moderate-sized insect prey. The American Naturalist, 193(2), 309-317. https://doi.org/10.1086/701433
CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12AmwsPIlG6_L9s_7oMkepGG2MhMTta-xilXk1jhyLcI/edit?usp=sharing
Personal Website: https://mhbabb.com/
Liz Haseltine
Liz is a graduate student in the COMIC Lab. She graduated from Missouri State University with a Bachelor of Science degree, majoring in both Psychology and Anthropology. As an undergraduate, she worked with Amber Massey-Abernathy studying the relationship between pragmatic skills and dominance in humans. After the completion of her degree, she contributed to behavioral studies at Lincoln Park Zoo, Brookfield Zoo, and Zoo Atlanta with over 10 species, including gorillas, chimpanzees, and emerald tree boas. She also assisted Ryan Brady from Robert Hampton’s Laboratory of Comparative Primate Cognition on studies investigating the characteristics of working memory in orangutans.
Her current research interests include strategic decision making, problem solving, and metacognitive regulation in human and non-human primates. Liz is in the process of proposing her dissertations project. She is also working at Zoo Atlanta on a project to examine the performance of lizards in a radial arm maze. Click here for her full CV.
Publications:
Beran, M., Kleider-Offutt, H. M., French, K., Haseltine, E. L., James, B. (2023). Assessing aphantasia prevalence and the relation of self-reported imagery abilities and memory task performance. Consciousness and Cognition, 113, 103548.
Haseltine, E. L. & James, B. (2021). Metamemory. In J. Vonk & T. K. Shackelford (Eds.), Encyclopedia of animal cognition and behavior. Springer.
Haseltine, E. L., & Beran, M. J. (2020). Counting. In J. Vonk & T. K. Shackelford (Eds.), Encyclopedia of animal cognition and behavior. Springer.
Massey-Abernathy, A., & Haseltine, E. L. (2018). Power talk: Communication styles, vocalization rates and dominance. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 48, 107-116.
Grace Heller
Grace is a Ph.D. student and Primate Social Cognition, Evolution, and Behavior 2CI fellow working under Dr. Sarah Brosnan in the CEBUS lab. Her research interests are social cognition and behavior particularly in the context of cooperation and collective decision making. Moreover, she is interested in a comparative approach that extends these studies beyond primates and into species that are traditionally thought to be less or non-social, such as reptiles and amphibians.
Prior to Georgia State University, she received her B.S. in Biology and B.S. in Environmental Science from Cleveland State University in 2022, where she conducted research under Dr. Michael Walton on Red-Backed salamander resource usage. She assessed forest floor interactions along with predicting possible shifts in these interactions due to micro-climate change. Additionally, under the supervision of Ph.D. candidate Kaylin Tennant (primary advisor Dr. Pam Davis), she collected Western Lowland Gorilla baseline behavior data to assess for the frequency of stress indicating aberrant behaviors, along with developmental indicators of an infant gorilla at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. Link to her CV.
Stella Mayerhoff
Stella is a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Sarah Brosnan in the CEBUS Lab. She is broadly interested in comparative primate cognition and behavior, and her recent research has focused on cognitive offloading, or the use of physical action to reduce the mental processing requirements of a task. She is heavily involved in science communication, including K-12 outreach and working as a research news writer for Georgia State’s College of Arts & Sciences.
She received her Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Psychology from the University of Wisconsin—Madison where she worked in both Dr. Karen Strier’s Muriqui Behavioral Ecology Database and Dr. Paula Niedenthal’s Emotions Lab. After graduating, she worked with bonobos as a Research Intern at the Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative. She then worked for Dr. Lauren Brent on Cayo Santiago in Puerto Rico investigating grooming reciprocity in rhesus macaques. Before beginning graduate school, she also collected observational data on wild bonobos at LuiKotale in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Publications/Poster
Mayerhoff, S. R., Saldaña Santisteban, J. M., & Brosnan, S. F. (2021). Social cooperation in primates. In B. L. Schwartz & M. J. Beran (Eds.), Primate cognitive studies. Cambridge University Press.
Mayerhoff, S. R. & Brosnan, S. F. (2019). Cooperation. In J. Vonk & T. K. Shackelford (Eds.), Encyclopedia of animal cognition and behavior. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Mayerhoff, S. R., Babb, M., Beran M. J., & Brosnan, S. F. (2023). File, save, forget: Cognitive offloading in non-human primates. Talk presented at the American Society for Primatologists Annual Meeting. Reno, NV.
Joey McKeon
Joey is a graduate student working in the COMIC lab. He graduated from Agnes Scott College with his B.A. in Psychology and a Biology minor. During his time as an undergraduate he participated in research in the fields of animal cognition, behavioral neuroscience, animal welfare, and ecology.
His current research interests include comparative self-directed learning, metacognitive knowledge, resilience-boosting behavior, and social learning/memory in humans and nonhuman primates.
His Masters thesis focused on self-directed learning by nonhuman primates. Joey is currently working on his dissertation proposal.
Publications (click here for his CV).:
McKeon, E. J., Torres, J., Kazama, A., Bachevalier, J., & Raper, J. (2022). Differential responses toward conditioned and unconditioned stimuli, but decreased hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis responsiveness in neonatal hippocampal lesioned monkeys. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 58, 101165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101165
McKeon, E. J., Beran, M. J., & Parrish, A. E. (2022). Children (Homo sapiens) but not rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) perceive the one-is-more illusion. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 136(4), 270-278. https://doi.org/10.1037/com0000316
McKeon, E., & Beran, M. J. (2021). Planning. In J. Vonk & T. K. Shackelford (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_780-1
McKeon, E. J., Trumbull, K. M., & Hughes, J. L. (2020). Supervisors’ gratitude and employees’ feelings about their supervisor and organization. Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research, 25(3), 272-277. https://doi.org/10.24839/2325-7342.JN25.3.272
Paige Petschl
Paige graduated from U.C. Davis with a B.S. in Animal Science in 2022. During her undergrad studies, she worked with cows at the UC Davis Dairy Facility and focused on welfare and husbandry management. She also worked in Dr. Karen Bales’ lab where she completed research with titi monkeys looking at how a reduction in human contact and cognitive testing (due to COVID research limitations) influenced infant behavioral independence. In addition, she examined titi infant survivorship as a factor of their parents’ pair relationship and prior parenting experience. After graduating, she worked as a Research Technician at the University of Minnesota and completed a study on effort discounting in rhesus macaques. Her current interests are centered around primate social cognition and behavior, specifically in how social relationships shape behavior, learning, and decision-making. She is also interested in the connection that hormones have with these behaviors. Click here for her CV.
Jhonatan Saldana
Jhonatan is a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Sarah Brosnan in the CEBUS Lab.
Andres Sanchez
Andres is a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Michael Beran in the COMIC Lab. Andres completed his undergraduate studies in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a minor in sociology from Georgia State University. In the Fall of 2020, he started his graduate studies in the Cognitive sciences program at Georgia State University under the advisement of Dr. J. David Smith and Dr. Barbara Church. Here, he completed his Master’s thesis that focused on the role of selective attention on implicit category learning.
His current main research interests include human and non-human primate cognition, categorization, explicit and implicit learning, symbol learning, relational conceptualization, and metacognition. Other background interests include working memory, attention, and consciousness.
Currently, Andres is preparing his dissertation proposal. Click here for his CV.
Sierra Simmons
Sierra is a Ph.D. student and a Primate Social Cognition, Evolution & Behavior 2CI fellow working with Dr. Sarah Brosnan in the CEBUS Lab. Sierra started in the Cognitive Sciences graduate program at Georgia State University in the fall of 2020. Her research interests begin with the individual’s variations in social cognition, decision-making, and cooperation. Then looking at the implications of these variations on both intragroup/intergroup relationships. To study these variations and relationships, Sierra likes to combine comparative, evolutionary, and biological approaches.
Prior to joining the CEBUS lab, Sierra worked for Dr. John Capitanio from UC Davis and Dr. Karen Parker from Stanford University where they were researching various aspects of using rhesus macaques as a model for the social deficit in Autism Spectrum Disorder. In addition, Sierra has done some work at the Maderas Rainforest Conservancy looking at social energy budgets between white-faced capuchins and black mantled howler monkeys. In 2018, She finished her undergraduate in cognitive science at University of California, Davis.
Updated 14-Feb-2025