Ashley Hao

Ashley Hao

Master’s Student in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Xin (Ashley) Hao

Hi there! Thanks for visiting! I’m Ashley Hao, and this site shares my work on learning, attention, and developmental cognitive neurscience :)

🎓 Education & Training

I am currently pursuing my M.S. in Cognitive Psychology at Vanderbilt University 🐿️ Peabody College, working under the supervision of Dr. Sophia Vinci-Booher and Dr. Gavin Price to investigate number processing across early childhood.

Before Vanderbilt, I earned dual B.S. degrees in Neuroscience and Psychology from Syracuse University 🍊. As an undergraduate, I worked on projects in mindfulness-based interventions, school performance, and stress-related psychophysiology in children and adolescents.

🧠 Research Interests

(1) Developmental trajectories of neuroplasticity

  • Age-related changes in functional lateralization, selectivity and white matter supporting learning (letters, numbers) and academic skills (reading, mathematics).
  • Longitudinal individual variability in learning-related cortical reorganization
  • Linking neural efficiency and flexibility to cognitive growth and academic outcomes

(2) Learning and attention development

  • Neural mechanisms of emergence and development of attentional control
  • Experience-driven plasticity of frontal-parietal attention networks
  • How attentional states modulate learning efficiency during skill acquisition

(3) Integrating developmental computational and neuroimaging approaches

  • Model-based fMRI and MVPA to reveal representational changes during learning
  • Developmentally informed machine learning to predict trajectories of learning and attention

✨ Broader Goal

Through this work, I aim to uncover mechanistic principles of neuroplasticity that drive learning and attention across development.

By bridging brain and behavior, my long-term goal is to inform developmental cognitive and educational neuroscience, and to guide the design of interventions that promote adaptive learning and cognitive growth in children.

You can learn more about my current projects and publications in this website, or get in touch at 📧 xin.hao@vanderbilt.edu

Last updated November 2025.