Trisha B. Thomas, Ph. D.

I am a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Education in the Learning Media Lab. I completed my Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), where I was part of the Speech and Bilingualism research group. During my doctoral studies, I was also a visiting scholar at the University of California, Irvine, where I contributed to the Converse to Learn project, a collaboration I continue as a postdoctoral researcher.

At Harvard, my research focuses on how children engage with AI conversational agents to enhance learning outcomes. I am particularly interested in how automatic speech recognition systems handle the acoustic variation in multilingual children's speech, as well as investigating the neural responses of children during interactions with both AI and human partners.

During my Ph.D., I used behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG) methods to study how speaker characteristics, such as native or non-native accents, influence attention, memory, and listening effort. My work aims to shed light on the cognitive mechanisms involved in non-native speech processing and its impact on information retention.