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RESEARCH INTERESTS
How
does the human mind innovate and create using past and present
knowledge? What enhances--or impairs--our ability to optimally
take advantage of our acquired experience and learning? My
research and intellectual interests address these questions and aim to
build new bridges from human memory to thinking. Using the
diverse and convergent methodologies of cognitive neuroscience, my goal
is to understand the benefits and hazards of memory so as to enable us
to think more effectively and adaptively. Methods Human
beings
often show surprisingly large fluctuations in how readily and
accurately they
can “retrieve” what they know. Such
fluctuations influence how flexibly we can use knowledge to inform our
judgments, decisions, and actions. My
research focuses on factors that affect how we gain access to, or
awareness of,
what we know and remember, and the accuracy and confidence associated
with such
access. Research is
conducted with young adults, older adults, and neuropsychological
populations
with memory deficits (e.g., individuals with global amnesia) to explore
cognitive and neuropsychological factors that affect the accuracy and
ease with
which we retrieve and use previously acquired information. Other
work
uses neuroimaging techniques (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to
examine
the neuroanatomical correlates of memory encoding and retrieval in
healthy
young adults in relation to such factors as recent exposure to a word
or object
(priming), or the type of judgment that was required during the initial
versus
subsequent encounter with a stimulus. One
current focus of research
concerns the specificity of the representations that support memory and
judgment. We can remember events with differing levels of detail,
recalling information in a highly specific and detailed manner, or in a
more
general, meaning-based, conceptual, or “gist-like” manner. Under
what
conditions do we rely on each of these types of information? Do
individuals with memory deficits such as healthy older adults or global
amnesics rely more on one or the other of these types of information,
or are
both forms equally impaired? Most
recently, I have been exploring
how the specificity with which we consider information itself sets a
context
for our later judgments and decisions. Both particularity and
abstraction
are essential to human thought but adaptive movement between them is
powerfully
constrained by cognitive processes. Another, more recent, focus is on
the level of confidence associated with decisions that we make in
various
domains, such as perceptual and memory judgments, and complex
classifications. What types of information support feelings of
confidence? What are the neuroanatomical correlates of the
assessment of,
and experience of, feelings of confidence? How is the ability to
appropriately align confidence with actual performance in cognitive and
more
complex judgments affected by various situational and task
demands? Does
the alignment of one's confidence level with one's actual performance
get
better––or worse––as we get older? BACK |
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