You can reach me at either of the following addresses.

For academic and research matters:

    mpascale [AT] bu [DOT] edu

For all other personal and professional matters:

    mpascale [AT] psyc [DOT] dev

My public key fingerprint is: 

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You may download it directly from static.psyc.dev/pubkey. 

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I have extended this key's validity through December, 2029.

Michael P. Pascale

Cognitive Psychology | Data Science | Research Software

Email Google Scholar GitHub ORCID Twitter/X BlueSky LinkedIn OpenPGP

Hello! I am a doctoral student in the Cognition and Decision Lab at Boston University.

My research is concerned with human information behavior, which I approach from the perspective of computational cognitive neuroscience. Of particular interest to me are those information seeking and exploratory behaviors which appear to be curiosity-driven.

Curiosity is a state of being with deep cultural significance1, attended to by many generations of philosophers and several generations of psychologists2 34. Only recently is it possible to integrate these efforts with cognitive neuroscience5 6, wherein the past fourty years1 of work has yielded insight into the neural underpinnings of motivation and decision-making. The study of curiosity brings up many questions evocative of neuroepistemology and neuroaesthetics.

  • How does our experience of curiosity, and the conditions under which we exhibit it, improve or impair our ability to find truth?
  • Why is it that particular information content or presentation promotes curious states more or less than others?
  • To what extent do nonhuman animals exhibit exploratory behavior that resembles human curiosity-driven behavior?

On a broader scale, I am particularly interested how these aspects of individual psychology impact social epistemology and the acquisition of knowledge as a human social endeavor.

I also am an avid supporter of the open source movement, contributing to free texts and to software tools in the social sciences. Generally I welcome solicitations for tutoring or free software work.

Education

Doctoral Student - Psychology (Current, Since 2023)
PhD Program in Brain, Behavior, and Cognition		 Boston University
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Master of Arts - Psychology (2025)
Conferred en route to PhD
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science (2020)
Psychology and Mathematics Minors		 University of Massachusetts Lowell
Kennedy College of Sciences

Previous Experience

Massachusetts General Hospital
Center For Addiction Medicine		 Programmer
March 2021 — July 2023
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Applied Cognition Lab		 Programmer
May 2020 — May 2021
University of New Hampshire
Affect, Cognition and Computation Lab		 Research Assistant
September 2020 — March 2021
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Applied Cognition Lab		 Research Assistant
January 2020 — May 2020
Teledyne Technologies Inc.
Teledyne DALSA		 Software Engineer Intern
June 2019 — September 2019

Teaching

Drugs and Behavior
Graduate Teaching Fellow		 Spring 2025
CAS PS333, Boston University
Physiological Psychology
Graduate Teaching Fellow		 Fall 2024
CAS PS336, Boston University
Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
Graduate Teaching Fellow		 Spring 2024
CAS PS231, Boston University

Technical Skills

  • Computer Programming
    R, JavaScript, C, C++, Python

  • Data Wrangling
    Tidyverse, Excel, Pandas, SQL

  • Data Visualization
    ggplot2, Three.js

  • Development Environments
    Visual Studio Code, RStudio, Jupyter, MATLAB, JetBrains

  • Web Development
    HTML/CSS, Shiny, Django, Vue, PHP, Express

  • Electronic Data Collection
    REDCap, Qualtrics, PsychoPy, E-Prime

References

1.
Papastephanou, M. ed. (2019). Toward New Philosophical Explorations of the Epistemic Desire to Know: Just Curious about Curiosity (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).
2.
James, W. (1918). The principles of psychology (Henry Holt and Company via Project Gutenberg).
3.
Berlyne, D.E. (1954). A theory of human curiosity. British Journal of Psychology 45, 180–191.
4.
Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin 116, 75–98. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.1.75.
5.
Kidd, C., and Hayden, B.Y. (2015). The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity. Neuron 88, 449–460. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010.
6.
Cervera, R.L., Wang, M.Z., and Hayden, B.Y. (2020). Systems neuroscience of curiosity. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 35, 48–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.06.011.

Footnotes

  1. Approximating the field’s beginning as marked in 1989 with the first issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.↩︎