Auditory learning has fascinated me for a long time. Before pursuing science, I had spent years trying to learn the skills necessary to become a sound engineer/musician. As my attempts began to fail, I became more and more curious of how experiences impact auditory skills. I received my Ph.D. in the Neural and Cognitive Plasticity lab at SUNY Buffalo while conducting research on this question. Afterwards, I did a postdoc at in the Battlespace Acoustics Branch of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in which I incorporated EEG methods into Air Force relevant auditory cognition studies. Over the years, I have developed an inter-disciplinary research program on auditory learning and cognition that employs a variety of methods with collaborators in multiple scientific disciplines (e.g., Psychology, Neuroscience, Engineering, Audiology). In August of 2018, this research program moved to K-State.

While in college, I became preoccupied with problems related to "how we know we know and do not know", i.e., metacognition ("cognition about cognition"). In graduate school at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), I studied metacognition from a comparative perspective, testing uncertainty monitoring in humans and rhesus macaques. I did my postdoctoral work at the University of Richmond, exploring effects of aging on metacognitive ability. Recently, I have focused on how individuals’ confidence judgments predict performance accuracy during psychophysical discrimination and memory tasks as well as exploring neural correlates of confidence using EEG. In the ALC lab at K-State, I continue this work by examining effects of learning on metacognitive ability. 

I’m a fourth year  PhD graduate student in the Cognitive Psychology program. I am currently studying under Dr. Wisniewski looking into auditory perception using the EEG system. I am interested in effects on  auditory stimuli and auditory perceptual learning after multimodal training and how these plastic changes in the brain may relate to learning mechanisms. My future plans include continuing research in multimodal training effects on auditory perception, and eventually becoming a professor of Psychology.

Michael is a third-year PhD graduate student in the Cognitive Psychology graduate program with general research interests in perception and emotion. Michael is currently working with Dr. Wisniewski on a novel pitch matching task and plans to continue working in perception research after getting his degree.