Neslihan ÖNAY
I am interested in how emotion affects associative memory across the life span; particularly in children, adolescents, and young adults.
I graduated from the Psychology department at Bogazici University in Turkey in 2016. During my bachelor's, I worked as a research assistant on several projects on social cognition, music cognition, and autobiographical memory. Later, I worked in the market research industry for three years and worked on several projects with qualitative and quantitative approaches. I later wanted to continue scientific research with a great enthusiasm. For this purpose, I followed my education with a master's in neurosciences at UNIGE. During my master's project, I worked on neural correlates of attention deficits in incarcerated adolescents based on resting-state fMRI. I analyzed how the network-level interactions during rest correspond to attention problems in incarcerated juveniles.
Now, I am a Ph.D. student, working under the supervision of Prof. Ulrike Rimmele at the Emotion and Memory lab. In my Ph.D. project, I will study the effect of emotion on associative memory across development. For this reason, we will use behavioral paradigms and fMRI to reveal the neural correlates of associative memory in different age groups. What age groups share in common and differ from each other in terms of the effect of emotion on memory would bring valuable insights into clinical and educational settings.