Ms. Lijiya Chacko is a PhD candidate and a teaching assistant at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Bombay. She completed undergraduate studies in psychology at the University of Calicut and postgraduation in neural and cognitive sciences at the University of Hyderabad. Her doctoral research examines how attentional priority is shaped by multiple influences, including emotional salience, reward associations, and prior experience.
Prior to her doctoral studies, Lijiya gained substantial experience in experimental cognitive science through research positions at Cognitive Behavioural Neuroscience Laboratory, IIT Bombay, and the Action Control and Cognition Lab at the University of Hyderabad. She has also contributed to research training initiatives, including conducting workshops on experimental methods and eye-tracking applications at the Annual Conference of Cognitive Sciences, 2024. She was awarded the International Brain Research Organization’s Neuroscience Training Grant to attend Cognitive Neuroimaging Skills Training in Cambridge, held at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, UK, in September 2025.
As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow, Lijiya is examining the behavioral and neural mechanisms of statistically learned spatial attentional biases, with particular emphasis on whether such biases operate automatically and persist over time, or whether they remain flexible and responsive to current goals. Through her research, she aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how past experiences shape attention, with implications for cognitive theory and real-world adaptive behavior. She enjoys music, books and movies in her leisure time.