Team
Jorge Morales
Lab Director
Jorge is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Philosophy. He’s interested in conscious experiences and how we know them. His research focuses on vision, mental imagery and metacognition to study the subjective character of the mind. To do this, he employs an interdisciplinary approach that integrates tools from psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Before joining Northeastern, Jorge earned a PhD from Columbia University where he simultaneously trained in psychology and neuroscience. He was a postdoc at Johns Hopkins in the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department. Jorge was born and raised in Mexico City, where he obtained an MA at Mexico’s National University (UNAM) and a BA from Universidad Panamericana. Jorge loves good coffee, photography and is currently obsessed with the Rubik’s cube.
Dillon Plunkett
Post-doctoral Researcher
Dillon is interested in consciousness, complex thought, and the relationship between the two. Which mental processes do we consciously experience and what determines the character of those experiences? What kinds of thoughts are we capable of thinking and how does the brain encode them? He investigates these questions using neuroimaging, computational modeling, and behavioral experiments. He did his PhD research at Harvard with Joshua Greene. Before that, he studied philosophy at Harvard as an undergraduate and was a lab manager at UC Berkeley with Tania Lombrozo and Tom Griffiths. Outside of research, Dillon is interested in climbing, physics, wilderness conservation, and team games (with a particular fondness for bughouse chess). His favorite color is purple.
Xueyi Huang
Graduate Student
Xueyi is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology. She is interested in mental representations, perception, and imagery, and in how the external world constructs our inner minds. During her undergraduate research, she compared the attentional biases from items embedded in visual imagery and visual working memory, and she explored whether visual imagery and visual working memory share the same representational system. Xueyi was born and raised in Shanghai and obtained her B.S. from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. In her spare time, she enjoys exploring Boston, watching movies and tennis games, and playing ping pong.
Michael McPhee
Graduate Student
Michael McPhee is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology. His research focuses on consciousness, perception and metacognition, and uses psychophysics, pupillometry and neuroimaging to investigate conscious awareness in neurotypical people and patients with disorders of consciousness. Before coming to Northeastern, Michael was a Junior Research Scientist and Lab Manager in the Ripollés Lab at New York University, the Assistant to the Associate Director of NYU’s Music and Audio Research Laboratory (MARL), and a research assistant in the Laboratory of Neural Systems at Rockefeller University. Michael received a B.A. in Biology, Neuroscience, and Cognitive Science from Williams College in 2015. Outside of the lab, Michael loves to bike around Boston and overanalyze TV shows. He and his team are the 2023 champions, and he was the MVP, of the Boston chapter of the APA (American Pool Association).
Krissy Kilgallen
Affiliate Graduate Student
Krissy has a B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Sociology from Northeastern. She was our first research program coordinator and after graduation she worked as a junior researcher at Briony Swire-Thompson’s Psychology of Misinformation Lab. She is now a PhD student here at Northeastern working on intuitive thinking in the CORE Lab with John Coley. Krissy still has some projects with us on metacognition. Her interests span beyond the academy—Krissy is also a yoga teacher!
Selina Guter
Graduate Student (Philosophy)
More info coming soon!
Morgan McCarty
Research Assistant
Morgan is a third-year Computer Science major in the Artificial Intelligence concentration with a minor in Cell and Molecular biology. His studies have focused on missing components of AI and how incorporating psychological research can help finding them. His research interests are very diverse: from evolutionary algorithms to the dangers of autonomous driving, Morgan is very interested in studying anything that can have a direct connection to the human world through the use of AI. In the Subjectivity Lab, Morgan is working on a project for assessing conscious awareness using pupillometry and Virtual Reality. Outside of research and study, Morgan loves to take a step back from technology and hike trails in the woods, go for long bike rides, or row on the Charles River.
Collaborators
- Megan Peters (UC Irvine)
- Steve Fleming (UCL)
- Nadine Dijkstra (UCL)
- Michael Young (Mass General Hospital /
Harvard Medical School) - Briony Swire-Thompson(Northeastern)
- Kishore Kuchibhotla (Johns Hopkins)
- Matthias Michel (NYU)
- Hakwan Lau (RIKEN)
- Chaz Firestone (Johns Hopkins
Alumni
- Saurish Srivastava (Princeton)
- Odysseas Nikas (Northeastern)
- Bridget Leary (Northeastern)