07/21/2026
The UC San Diego Department of Cognitive Science is delighted to announce the 2026 winners of the Dr. Robert Glushko ‘79 Honors Thesis Prize in Cognitive Science. Andrew Gibson, Caroline Hall-Scherr and Zoe Kothari all recently graduated with honors after completing mentored research projects, while maintaining outstanding academic grades. The title and a brief description of their work is provided below. A monetary prize is awarded to each of these students and is made possible by the generosity of a fund established in 2021 by alumnus, Dr. Robert Glushko.
Andrew Gibson:
Thesis title: “Social Context Impacts Rhythmic Coordination Within Affective and Interoceptive Circuits”
A companion changes how brain regions work together during fear. Rats who are accompanied during threat spend less time freezing, yet show more coordinated rhythmic activity between affective and interoceptive brain regions.
Caroline Hall-Scherr:
Thesis title: “Use of Acoustic Cues in the Perception of /ɹ/ and /w/ in Child Speech: Do Adults and Children Listen in the Same Way?”
My project focused on how children and adults understand child-produced R and W sounds and how the acoustic properties of the speech signal inform perceptual decision making. Development seems to play a role: adults robustly utilize acoustic cues to determine speech sound identity while children are less sensitive to those same cues.
Zoe Kothari:
Thesis title: “The Cognitive Consequences of Instruction Design in Model Assembly”
My thesis investigates how the affordances of virtual interactive and static printed instructional diagrams affect the model assembly experience. Through a within-subjects study, I examined both traditional performance measures and qualitative aspects of how cognition was distributed across the workspace system.
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