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Psychology > Faculty & Staff > Keith Hutchison
Lab
Interests
When our attention is focused elsewhere or is divided
among several tasks, our automatic habits tend to dominate
performance. For instance, a person might purchase some
gas from an attendant and then drive off without filling
the tank. Our lab investigates the function of the brain's
prefrontal cortex, an area largely responsible
for our ability to multi-task and pay attention.
A goal of our research is to understand how peoples'
degree of conscious control over performance changes
across situations and across individuals. In addition
to examining individual differences in attentional control
among young adults, we also test healthy older adults
from the community to examine a potential decline in
control with age.
Our lab collaborates with Michelle Meade's Memory
and Aging Lab in collecting data on similar tasks
from healthy older adults from within the Bozeman Community
and also with Dave
Balota and the Alzheimer's
Disease Research Center at Washington University
in St. Louis in collecting data from healthy older adults
and patients with Alzheimer's dementia.This combination
of projects should provide insight into how age and
dementia differentially impair peoples' ability to exert
attentional control.
Phenomena of current interest
include:
(1) Instructional and
proportional manipulations in semantic priming tasks.
(2) Memory to perform an
intended future action in the face of distraction.
(3) Effects of selective
attention, practice, & proportion congruency in
the "Stroop" task.
(4) Individual differences
in working memory capacity
(5) Discrimination of "real"
from "false" memories.
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