Our lab investigates human attention, memory, and language processes.
In the attention domain, we focus on peoples' ability (or inability) to control attention and how this influences performance across a variety of tasks including word recognition/pronunciation, memory for word lists, and inhibiting dominant (but inappropriate) responses.
In the memory and language domains, we focus on both benefitial and detrimental effects of context on word recognition and memory.
Another goal of our research is to understand how cognitive 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 potential changes 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) Effects of selective attention, practice,
& proportion congruency in the "Stroop" task.
(3) Discrimination healthy aging from the earliest stages of Alzheimer's Disease.
(4) Individual differences in working memory
capacity.
(5) Discrimination of "real" from
"false" memories.
