My research investigates how meaning—especially emotional meaning—guides attention, memory, and decision-making. I’m particularly interested in how emotionally charged language captures visual attention, how this process shifts across the lifespan, and how it interacts with individual differences in working memory, vocabulary, and perceptual skill.

I earned my PhD in Cognition and Neural Science from the University of Utah in 2025. Much of my graduate work focused on the relationship between covert and overt visual attention—how we perceive meaning in our environment and during complex tasks (like reading this sentence!). My dissertation examined how emotional information in the parafovea—the area just outside direct gaze—affects reading behavior and memory encoding differentially in both older and young adults. Using eye-tracking and EEG, I studied how emotional information appearing within the 'useful field of view' shapes what we notice and what we remember, and how these patterns change with age.

In one cognitive aging study using eye-tracking, I found novel age-related differences in how emotional meaning guides attention during natural reading: older adults showed a positivity effect—a tendency to focus more on positive content—while younger adults demonstrated a negativity bias, allocating greater attention to negative emotional material.

More broadly, I use experimental, behavioral, and neurophysiological methods to study how language is processed in real time, both consciously and outside of awareness. Beyond language processing, I’ve contributed to projects examining error monitoring and cognitive control—how we update our understanding after making a mistake—as well as how attention can be overloaded when interacting with complex technologies, such as automated driving systems.

I'm especially interested in questions that sit at the boundary between basic and applied science. My goal is to use tools from cognitive neuroscience to generate both mechanistic insight and clinically relevant metrics—particularly in support of patient-centered rehabilitation and the development of intuitive neurotechnology.

Whether in lab studies or applied UX settings, my research is grounded in the idea that language is embodied, emotional, and deeply visual—and that to understand it, we need to study how people actually use it, in context.

Keywords: Eye-tracking/EEG/ CoRegistration/ Electrophysiology / psycholinguistics / semantic memory/ vision science / embodied cognition

Education

Doctorate of Philosophy, PhD, Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Utah (2022-2024) Open Science Framework (OSF) - Preregistration data and pipelines can be found at https://osf.io/s9bh6

Master of Science - MS, Cognitive Neuroscience / Psychology, University of Utah (2019-2022)

Graduate coursework / Communication Sciences & Disorders - Speech-Language Pathology (4.0 GPA), University of Utah, College of Health - (2018)

Graduate Certificate (Professional), Usability, & Assistive Technology / Augmentative & Rehabilitation Engineering, ADA Health Policy, California State University (DH), (2015)

Bachelor of Science - B.S. Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Idaho (2014-2016)

Bachelor of Science - B.S. Medical Anthropology (minor in Bioethics), San Francisco State University (2009-2012)

Conference Presentations & Invited Talks

Lopes, C.L., (2024) Rose-colored Semantics: Exploring Age Related Perceptual Changes Across the Perceptual Span. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, HELD Meeting.

Lopes, C.L., Payne, B.R., (2024) Motivated Attention in Reading: Lexical Valence Moderates Parafoveal Preview Benefits Differently in Younger and Older Adults, Evidence from Gaze-Contingent Boundary Paradigms. Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting 2024

Lopes, C.L., Payne, B.R., (2023) Investigating the Age-Related Positivity Effect in Parafoveal Word Processing During Natural Reading. Society for Affective Science Annual Meeting 2023

Lopes, C. L., Payne, B.R., (2022) Individual Differences in Verbal Working Memory and Parafoveal Word Processing During Natural Reading. Leading Edge Co-Registration Conference (NSF/Psychonomics Society).

Lopes, C.L., Payne, B.R., (2022) Understanding the time course of semantic processing across the visual field during reading: Reconciling evidence from ERPs and eye movement behavior. Society for Psychophysiological Research, 2022

Lopes, C.L., Silox, J.W., Payne, B.R., (2020) Probing Prediction Costs & Benefits: What Response Times and ERPs Reveal About the Role of Volitional Control in Context Processing. Society for Psychophysiological Research, 2020.

Silcox, J., & Lopes, C., Payne, B. (2019) The Role of the Left Inferior Frontal Cortex in Memory for Predictable and Unpredictable Words: An Event-Related rTMS Study.

Lopes, Erickson, Cooper, Wheatley, Strayer, (2019). Driven to comment: Learning from older drivers impressions of in-vehicle technologies. Proceedings of Human Factors and Ergonomics Society DOI: 10.1177/1071181319631134

University Courses Taught

• Sensation and Perception (2023, 2024) - taught 4x

• Cognitive Psychology (2021,2022,2023,2024) taught 6x

• Methods (2021)

• General Psychology