I am Xiaojin Ma (go by Jin), a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Nick Gaspelin in the Department of Psychological Science at the University of Missouri, Columbia. I study visual attention, perception, and cognitive control. My research questions what factors affect attentional deployment across visual scenes, and how the distractive effect of salient-but-irrelevant sensory inputs can be inhibited. I work primarily in MATLAB, Python, and R, and approach research questions with psychophysics methods, eye tracking, and event-related potentials.

Before this, I earned my Ph.D. in Psychological & Brain Sciences from Washington University in St. Louis in 2023, with my fabulous advisor Dr. Richard A. Abrams. I was originally from Shenzhen, China, and earned my B.Sc. in Psychology from South China Normal University in 2018.