Ellie Bean Abrams is a PhD student in NYU’s Cognition and Perception program working under the supervision of Pablo Ripollés and David Poeppel. Before starting her PhD, Ellie worked at NYU’s Neuroscience of Language lab, where she investigated basic linguistic processing in the child brain using MEG. Previously she studied cognitive science and music at Pomona College.
Ellie’s research explores musical engagement, beginning at the moment the brain extracts a perceived pitch from an auditory stimulus and ending at the experience of individualized musical pleasure. More broadly, she uses music, an abstract stimulus, to study the interaction between human memory and reward using behavioral, neural, and computational techniques. She is also interested in the speech-music interface and the encoding of lower- and higher-order musical features.