Skylar Tsai
Skylar Tsai is a fourth-year with a double major in psychobiology and neuroscience. She was born and raised in Taiwan and came to pursue college education in the United States. Skylar’s research interests span the gamut from embodied cognition to neurodegenerative diseases. From early on, she has attempted to dip her toes into musicology, visual studies, and cognitive psychology through independent projects. Her drive to engage in research stemmed from her fascination with synesthesia but has been fueled by her involvement in the Multisensory Processing Lab and the Cross Lab. Under the mentorship of Dr. Ladan Shams, she will be completing her honors thesis on the relationship between manual movements and visuospatial bootstrapping. She is developing a computer-based experiment that tests participants’ working memory of digits when encoding is completed visuospatially and motorically. The goal of this project is to make a conjecture about how long-term memory representations of numbers can be augmented through day-to-day exposures on the auditory, visual, and motoric dimensions, as well as about how those representations can bolster short-term recall. As she wraps up her studies at UCLA, she hopes to pursue a career in healthcare and hone her knowledge in neurorehabilitation.
