Memory is at the heart of virtually all other psychological processes and behaviors. The research in our lab focuses on furthering our understanding of how people acquire, retrieve and use information. In particular we examine the variables that affect the ease of building new knowledge structures. In this lab, we have used a variety of methodologies to provide converging evidence to test our theories. These include computational modeling, behavioral studies (that measure accuracy and latency to acquire and retrieve information), psychopharmacological interventions (midazolam that creates temporary anterograde amnesia) and neuroimaging (EEG and fMRI).
Examples of on-going projects in the lab:
- Testing whether individual differences in working memory predict performance in location recall under a theory of resource depletion
- Expanding our research that demonstrates that chunk acquisition is accelerated by forcing harder discriminations in a visual search task. Does the advantage of harder discrimination occur during encoding or during search or both?