Faculty Research Interests and Representative Publications
(see links to other research projects at the bottom of the page)
Dr. Anne Cleary maintains an active research laboratory that investigates the processes involved in recognition memory. One line of research is aimed at identifying what features of an item or situation can produce familiarity-based recognition. A second line of research is aimed at investigating the role of existing knowledge in recognition memory. A third line of research is aimed at linking feelings of familiarity in recognition with such day to day experiences as the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, and déjà vu experiences.
Cleary, A. M. & Specker, L. E. (2007). Recognition without face identification. Memory & Cognition, 35,1610-1619.
Cleary, A. M. (2006). Relating familiarity-based recognition and the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: Detecting a word’s recency in the absence of access to the word. Memory & Cognition, 34, 804-816.
Cleary, A. M. (2004). Orthography, phonology, and meaning: Word features that give rise to feelings of familiarity in recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 446-451.
Dr. Benjamin Clegg maintains an active research laboratory investigating a variety of aspects of human performance. Much of this work has centered on the general topic of skill acquisition. A core component of this research has been studies of implicit learning – that is, knowledge acquired without any direct intention to learn it, and with limited subsequent awareness of the information that has been learned. Think about what you could tell someone about how to ride a bike, or swing a golf club, or the sequence of
activities to perform as you drive your car through a junction. Dr Clegg’s research explores the nature of the representation of the unconscious knowledge used to guide performance. The central issues revolve around how you learn things, and what you then know. This work has included the use of a number of basic research paradigms (such as sequence learning in the serial reaction time task, and the Hebb Digits task), as well as more complex real-world tasks.
Clegg, B. A. (2005). Stimulus-specific sequence representation in serial reaction time tasks. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58A, 1087-1101.
Clegg, B. A., Wood, J. A., & Bugg, J. M. (2004). Real and imagined movements in older and younger adults. Journal of Mental Imagery, 28, 1-16.
Hopp, P. J., Smith, C. A. P., Clegg, B. A., & Heggestad, E. D. (2005). Interruption management: The use of attention-directing tactile cues. Human Factors, 47, 1-11.
Dr. Edward DeLosh maintains an active research laboratory in human learning and memory. One line of research focuses on how the distinctive features of items versus the relationship between items influence memory. This issue is considered as it relates to the bizarreness effect, word frequency effect, generation effect, and false recognition. Other research interests examine how study schedules (spacing vs. massing) and the act of retrieving information (generating it on your own or being tested on it) effect subsequent memory for that information. An additional line of research considers the role of memory for individual instances versus abstraction in conceptual behavior such as prediction, interpolation, and extrapolation. Although much of Dr. DeLosh’s work is conducted with young adults, these and other topics in are also considered as they apply to healthy aging.
Bugg, J. M., DeLosh, E. L., & Clegg, B. A. (2006). Physical activity moderates time-of-day differences in older adults’ working memory performance. Experimental Aging Research, 32, 431-436.
Carpenter, S. K., & DeLosh, E. L. (2006). Impoverished cue support enhances subsequent retention: Support for the elaborative retrieval explanation of the testing effect. Memory & Cognition, 34, 268-276.
Merritt, P., DeLosh, E. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2006). Effects of word frequency on individual-item and serial-order retention: Tests of the order-encoding view. Memory & Cognition, 34, 1615-1627.
Dr. David P. McCabe maintains an active research laboratory investigating human memory. Questions addressed in the lab include: Is working memory capacity, i.e., the ability to concurrently maintain and manipulate information, related to episodic memory? Can people accurately report when they are experiencing conscious recollection? Are people accurate in their assessments of how much they can remember over the short term? Experimental and individual differences methodologies are used to study episodic memory, working memory capacity, and metamemory. Much of this research focuses on adult age differences in memory performance.
McCabe, D. P. (in press). The role of covert retrieval in working memory span tasks: Evidence from delayed recall tests. Journal of Memory and Language.
McCabe, D. P., & Balota, D. A. (2007). Context effects on remembering and knowing: The expectancy heuristic. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 536-549.
McCabe, D. P., Smith, A. D, & Parks, C. P. (2007). Inadvertent plagiarism in young and older adults: The role of working memory capacity in reducing memory errors. Memory & Cognition, 35, 231-241.
Dr. Matthew G. Rhodes maintains an active research laboratory in human memory. One line of work examines how subjective experience is related to memory performance, particularly for tasks such as predicting future memory performance. Other work examines subjective experience and its relation to memory accuracy, including how it pertains to aging populations. Dr. Rhodes also maintains lines of work examining memory for faces, predictors of individual differences in memory accuracy, and recognition memory processes.
Rhodes, M. G., & Jacoby, L. L. (2007). Toward analyzing cognitive illusions: Past, present, and future. In J. S. Nairne (Ed.), The foundations of remembering: Essays in honor of Henry L. Roediger III (pp. 379-393). NY: Psychology Press.
Rhodes, M. G., & Jacoby, L. L. (2007). On the dynamic nature of response criterion in recognition memory: Effects of base rate, awareness, and feedback. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 305-320.
Rhodes, M. G., & Kelley, C. M. (2005). Executive processes, memory accuracy, and memory monitoring: An aging and individual differences analysis. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, 578-594.
Dr. Carol Seger studies how people learn about patterns present in the world, including concepts, categories, visual patterns, sequences, rules, and skills. She is interested in how patterns are represented in the mind and brain, how they affect our behavior, and how their representations are changed by experience. Much of the current research in her lab examines how the basal ganglia interact with cerebral cortexto subserve learning. In addition to behavioral techniques, her lab utilizes functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography.
Seger, C. A. (1994). Implicit learning. Psychological Bulletin, 115, 163-196.
Seger, C. A., & Cincotta, C. M. (2006). Dynamics of frontal, striatal, and hippocampal systems in rule learning. Cerebral Cortex, 16, 1546-1555.
Seger, C. A. (in press). How do the basal ganglia contribute to categorization? Their roles in generalization, response selection, and learning via feedback. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.