Jessica Yaros

Graduate Student
Office: 1400 Biological Sciences III
Email: jyaros@uci.edu

Jessica (Jessie) Yaros

About Me
Projects
Research Interest
Honors and Awards
Fun!
I am a PhD candidate in neurobiology and behavior studying the neural correlates of facial recognition. I first became interested in neuroscience in high school, realizing it was the marriage of my two favorite subjects – biology and psychology. Since then, I’ve spent a rewarding decade-plus learning about the brain. I started at UC San Diego’s Cognitive Science department, studying the mind though biological, anthropological, philosophical, and computational perspectives. This interdisciplinary training primed my current research on the neurological intersection of facial recognition with social and perceptual aspects of race.

Lab Research Projects

I contribute to the following research areas in the Translational Neuroscience Laboratory.

Individual Research Projects

My focus is uncovering the neural underpinnings of the Other-Race Effect (ORE). The ORE is a phenomenon mostly studied in social-psychological circles, defined as an impaired ability to remember faces of individuals in other race groups. The effect is captured colloquially in the opinion, “They all look the same to me.” It has particularly devastating impacts on criminal justice, with widespread wrongful convictions due to cross-race eye-witness testimony. Despite its pervasive and grave consequences, we still don’t entirely know how the brain supports these deficits in facial recognition, and a better understanding may support mitigation efforts to improve societal impacts.

I am interested in how social constructs and attention can impact behavior and memory. For instance, evidence has shown that reorienting attention can improve facial recognition of other-race faces. As little as adjusting body stance while speaking to other-race individuals raises amiable reports of those interactions and can reduce bias. Embodiment experiments find more empathy towards other-race individuals after people spend time in other-race bodies using virtual reality tools. Such psychological and neuroscientific experiments propose actionable changes we can take to improve race relations, and can and should be taught, trained, and implemented across institutional sectors.

It is important to learn to effectively communicate our science to the public, to share information that tax dollars support and to get the word out on important findings that have positive societal impacts. To that end, I have spent time honing my communications skills and have placed highly in research communication competitions here on campus, leading to invitations to speak about my research and represent the graduate community.
    • Invited Speaker, 2019 UCI Emeriti and Retiree Fall Gathering
    • Invited to represent Graduate Division at 2019
    • UCI Lauds and Laurels Alumni Awards Dinner
    • 2019 UCI Grad Slam Semi-finals – 2nd runner up out of 50 competitors
    • 2018 Associated Graduate Students Research Symposium – 1st place in Social Science category

At the time of writing this, life is unrecognizable– we are still highly sheltered in place. So my version of fun is a bit altered at the moment, and mostly involves escapist activities, like binge watching incredibly light nostalgic 90s anime. Sailor moon anyone? It’s awful and so good. Fortunately, this allows me to spend plenty of time with my cats, but it does drive away my fiancé. Potentially more constructive, I am taking a machine learning course online, which is surprisingly fun! I’m also a podcast junkie, and mostly listen to science and politics, but can’t fall asleep without listening to comedy improv… #NERDLIFE

What the lab means to me…
“When I chose to join the Yassa lab (and Mike chose to let me in!), it was only in part about the research. I’ve always highly valued a social environment in the workplace because it is necessary for my mental health and happiness. I connected so much with the other members of the lab, and the welcoming environment was such a draw. Further, Mike has a way of making you feel like you can do anything and gives you the liberty to choose your path which was incredible. He has fostered such a supportive community in the lab–future workplaces will be hard-pressed to match it!”

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