Tyler Warner

Tyler Warner is a graduate student in the Child Clinical Psychology doctoral program at Penn State. He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Chicago where he worked with Dr. Lindsey Richland in the University of Chicago Learning Lab. As an undergraduate, Tyler researched the development of analogical reasoning with both preschool-aged and school-aged children. His thesis analyzed the effectiveness of analogy and non-verbal gestures on the development of proportional reasoning skills in an elementary math lesson. This work solidified Tyler’s interest in understanding the mechanisms that support higher-order cognition, including when those mechanisms break down in the cases of ADHD and other executive functioning disorders. These interests led Tyler to the work of Dr. Cynthia Huang-Pollock at Penn State.

As a graduate student working with Dr. Huang-Pollock, Tyler has primarily focused on how individuals adjust cognitive control to meet task demands. He is especially interested in how this adaptation might be shaped differentially by age- or diagnostic-related differences in executive functioning. Tyler is currently working on a manuscript detailing how school-aged children, both with and without ADHD, can adapt their cognitive control to predictably improve performance after making errors on a set-shifting task. He recently began studying cognitive adaptability within other developmental groups, including for the pilot project of his dissertation, which focuses on deficits in set-shifting in young adults with high anxiety. Tyler is also collaborating with Dr. Frank Hillary, where he is focusing on older adults with traumatic brain injuries. Across these different projects, Tyler has developed an interest in identifying the best methodological practices to measure specific cognitive processes, including using computational modeling to focus on phenomena like speed-accuracy tradeoff and decision-making efficiency.

After graduation, Tyler plans to continue exploring methodologies that allow for better measurement of executive dysfunction across a range of developmental and clinical populations. He is particularly intent on translating the fundamental understanding of differences in executive functioning, and how such differences lead to behavioral and emotional problems, to the clinical setting to facilitate high-fidelity treatment plans.