Graduate student at Miller Memory lab
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
University of
California, Santa Barbara
Formerly grad student at Kantner
Lab, California State University, Northridge
B.S. Psychology, University of California, Riverside
My research lives at the intersection of memory, decision making, and
individual differences. I’m interested in understanding how people make
seemingly mundane decisions with limited, fuzzy, or contradictory
evidence across various domains (e.g., memory, perception, language).
I currently use recognition memory as the main vessel to study decision-making; I am also broadly interested in
metacognition (how it is involved in decision-making), misinformation (how individual differences in decision-making processes help us understand vulnerability to misinfo), meta-science, and Rstats.
My current project examines how people evaluate and incorporate
external memory information (e.g., base rate and feedback) to achieve "optimal"
decision making over time, why people exhibit varying levels of
decisional flexibility/adaptability, and what /optimality/ means across
contexts.
My background is in cognitive psychology with training in cognitive neuroscience, including methods such as EEG and fMRI. I call myself a cognitive scientist, a psychologist, a
cognitive neuroscientist, or a decision-making researcher interchangeably, depending
on the occasion. I also have extensive experience using my statistical and methodological expertise in projects outside of my own areas of research, such as these Institutional Research reports on student success from my time working at the IR Office at CSU Northridge.
I graduate in 2026 and am actively looking for a full-time job and/or project-based gigs! I would love to either continue my research on memory and decision-making as a postdoc, or apply my skills toward real-life problem-solving in industry/government/other alt-ac positions.
cv: view/download (pdf)
email: luna.li@psych.ucsb.edu
bsky: @luna-li.me (on hiatus)
last updated: 2025-10-09