Psychology Graduate Students

Matt Evans
  • Title
    • PhD Candidate
  • Division Social Sciences Division
  • Department
    • Psychology Department
  • Phone
    831-459-4513
  • Email
  • Website
  • Office Location
    • Social Sciences 2, SS2 380
  • Office Hours By appointment
  • Mail Stop Psychology Faculty Services

Research Interests

Music Cognition and Perception, especially:

  • Involuntary Musical Imagery, aka "earworms"
  • Musical memories
  • Attentional processes
  • Auditory elements of UX/UI

Biography, Education and Training

As a cognitive psychology PhD student, I specialize in how people mentally represent and interact with music in their everyday lives. My research focuses on understanding attention, memory, and perception, blending qualitative and quantitative methods to explore how individuals experience sound. I am skilled in experimental design, behavioral data analysis, and understanding complex human interactions in the pursuit of discovering insights that can translate into many applied research contexts.

Honors, Awards and Grants

  • Travel Award | International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition | August 2023
  • Best Presentation: Social Sciences Divison | Graduate Symposium, UCSC | May 2023                
  • Travel Award | Society of Music Perception and Cognition 2022 Conference | August 2022
  • Re-Entry STARS Scholarship | University of California, Santa Cruz | June 2021
  • Bruce Bridgeman Fellowship | University of California, Santa Cruz | September 2020

Selected Publications

Evans, M. G., Gaeta, P., & Davidenko, N. (2024). Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 1-12. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-024-02936-0