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).
Although I currently use recognition memory most often as the vessel to study decision-making, I am also 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 some training in
cognitive neuroscience, though I still prefer behavioral methods in my
own projects. I call myself a cognitive scientist, a psychologist, a
cognitive neuroscientist, or a decision-making researcher interchangeably, depending
on the occasion.
cv: view/download (pdf)
email: luna.li@psych.ucsb.edu
bsky: @luna-li.me (on hiatus)
last updated: 2026-06-05