About
I'm a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara
where I study how attention and thought shape behavior with
Dr. Barry Giesbrecht
and
Dr. Jonathan Schooler.
I also collaborate with researchers at NASA Ames Research Center
in the
Human–Computer Interaction Group, where I
study human–machine teaming in deep space mission analogs.
I'm so fortunate to have worked with incredible collaborators and mentors that have given me the tools
to do good research. Because of them, my work has been recognized on a few fronts. I am a recipient of
the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support my graduate studies,
the NASA Ames Honor Award for outstanding research contributions in HCI,
and the Morgan Award for Research Promise for my early work in
cognitive science. Here is a CV detailing my experience. Please reach out to me if you ever want to talk science!
Psychonomics 2025
At the Psychonomic Society's 66th Annual Meeting (2025), I'm presenting work on social desirability bias in mind-wandering reports.
Here is the
poster
and the corresponding
preprint.
Publications
equal contributions marked by asterisk
Marome, B.*, Shelat, S.*, & Schooler, J. W. (2025). The phenomenology of encoding: Experience sampling reveals thoughts associated with the retention of visual and verbal materials.
Consciousness and Cognition.
[pdf]
Garg, A., Shelat, S., & Schooler, J. W. (2025). Now I feel like I’m going to get to it soon: A brief, scalable intervention for state procrastination.
BMC Psychology.
[pdf]
Shelat, S., Homer, K. E., Karasinski, J. A., & Marquez, J. J. (2025). Multidimensional usability assessment in spaceflight analog missions.
Human-Computer Interaction for Space Exploration, SpaceCHI 4.0.
[pdf]
Shelat, S., & Giesbrecht, B. (2025). Perceptual decoupling in the sustained attention to response task is likely: Comment on Bedi, Russell, & Helton (2024).
Experimental Brain Research, 243(1), 86.
[pdf]
Garg, A., Shelat, S., Gross, M. E., Smallwood, J., Seli, P., Taxali, A., Sripada, C. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2025). Opening the black box: Think Aloud as a method to study the spontaneous stream of consciousness.
Consciousness and Cognition, 128.
[pdf]
Karasinski, J. A., Shelat, S., & Marquez, J. J. (2025). Validation of self-scheduling countermeasures in NASA’s HERA Campaign 6.
SciTech Forum. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
[pdf]
Shelat, S., Schooler, J. W., & Giesbrecht, B. (2024). Predicting attentional lapses using response time speed in continuous performance tasks.
Frontiers in Cognition, 3.
[pdf]
Shelat, S., Marquez, J. J., Zheng, J., & Karasinski, J. A. (2024). Collaborative system usability in spaceflight analog environments through remote observations.
Applied Sciences, 14(5), 2005.
[pdf]
Zheng, J., Shelat, S., & Marquez, J. J. (2023). Facilitating crew-computer collaboration during mixed-initiative space mission planning.
Human-Computer Interaction for Space Exploration, SpaceCHI 3.0.
[pdf]
Marquez, J. J., Shelat, S., & Karasinski, J. A. (2022). Promoting crew autonomy in a human spaceflight Earth analog mission through self-scheduling.
Accelerating Space Commerce, Exploration, and New Discovery, ASCEND, 4263. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
[pdf]
Shelat, S., Karasinski, J. A., Flynn-Evans, E. E., & Marquez, J. J. (2022). Evaluation of user experience of self-scheduling software for astronauts: Defining a satisfaction baseline.
Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Cham.
[pdf]
Young, A., Robbins, I., & Shelat, S. (2022). From micro to macro: The combination of consciousness.
Frontiers in Psychology, 1491.
[pdf]
Here are some of my favorite photos of Santa Barbara. Come hang out with some cool
cognitive scientists!
