|
>
Psychology > Faculty & Staff > Keith Hutchison
Lab
Interests
Our lab investigates the contributions of both automatic
and consciously-controlled mental processes to performance
across a wide range of cognitive tasks.
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) Discrimination of "real"
from "false" memories.
(4) Individual differences
in working memory capacity
(5) Effects of selective
attention, practice, & proportion congruency in
the "Stroop" task.
(6) The ability to overcome
potentially interfering effects of a "subliminal"
prime.
Though the automatic components of such tasks remain
relatively invariant, the controlled components are
sensitive to manipulations of instructions, contexts,
and mental workload. Moreover, there is substantial
intra-individual variability in peoples' degree of conscious
control over performance in such tasks. The goal of
this research is to understand how the relative dominance
of automatic versus controlled processes changes across
situations and across individuals in hope that this
will lead to a better understanding of breakdowns in
cognitive performance.
In addition to examining these phenomena in young
adults, we are testing healthy older adults from the
community. Each of these phenomena is predicted
to show a sharp decline with age, characteristic of
breakdowns in attentional control.
Our lab collaborates with the 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.
|
