Profile

Melissa Schoenlein is a graduate student in the Department of Psychology’s PhD program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She graduated from Bowling Green State University in 2018 with a BS in Psychology and a minor in Statistics. Melissa is a current member of the LUCID graduate training program. Her research aims to investigate the role of perceptual features on visual reasoning abilities and how those abilities are both learned and transferred to novel environments.
In particular she studies how people form color-concept associations that are used to make inferences about the meanings of colors. She also aims to investigate how using color as a grouping mechanism might enable transfer of knowledge across concepts. Her work has implications for understanding the processes that support human visual perception and cognition, and for applying such knowledge to designing effective information visualizations. She also plans to direct these research questions to educational settings to better understand how visual features can enhance or hinder learning in the classroom.