Ari Khoudary

Hello! Thanks for stopping by.

My name is Ari Khoudary and I use they/them/theirs pronouns. I’m a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, where I am co-advised by Aaron Bornstein and Megan Peters. I am affiliated with the Center for Theoretical and Behavioral Sciences (CTBS) and the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (CNLM), the latter of which has supported my research through a Howard Schneiderman-NIMH T32 fellowship.

My research aims to understand how humans use past experiences to behave more adaptively in the present. This means I spend a lot of time thinking about interactions between memory and perception, formal models of decision making, and how metacognition factors into memory-guided decision making. I use a combination of computational modeling, human behavioral experiments, and neuroimaging to approach these questions from a holistic, theory-driven perspective.

Before starting grad school, I got a B.S. in Psychology (honors) with a second major in Philosophy from Boston College in 2019. I wrote a double-credit senior thesis (advised in Psychology by Maureen Ritchey and in Philosophy by Richard Atkins) on the epistemic reliability of episodic memory, using an original experiment on source monitoring as a case study. Then, I worked as a lab manager and research assistant in Felipe De Brigard’s Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab at Duke University, where I did some neuroimaging and experimental philosophy research in addition to helping Felipe and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong coordinate the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy (SSNAP).

On a personal note, I am a queer, trans, neurodivergent, Syrian-American who cares deeply about the emotional and interpersonal dimensions of scientific research. I share my thoughts in this domain on my blog. I have long-standing interests in music, philosophy, food, and interdisciplinary endeavors. I also have a cat who I love very much. In my free time, I enjoy hanging out with friends, appreciating nature, and daydreaming about (nearby) possible worlds.