University of Michigan - Dearborn

Faculty Member, Behavioral Sciences

College of Arts, Sciences, and Lettes (CASL)

Thesis Title: On temporal relevance and temporal uncertainty in time-based prospective memory

About

I am actively immersed in research that can be construed broadly as studying the mental representations and cognitive processes that underlie many forms of for human learning and memory. Under that umbrella, I have at least four more specific programs of research. These include prospective memory, the residual effects of valence on both attention and memory, source monitoring, and theoretical issues in basic memory phenomena such as metacognition, recognition, and free recall. Prospective memory is a broad term referring to how people remember to complete their intentions. In this domain, I am actively conducting research on the cognitive processes that are necessary for successful intention retrieval, as well as how trade-offs between attention allocation strategies affect intention completion versus ongoing cognitive performance. My work with valenced materials attempts to extend the basic effects on memory to new domains such as metacognition and prospective memory that hitherto have been relatively neglected. Source monitoring is defined as the ability to specify the contextual details that were present when a memory is formed originally. My work in this domain concerns both theoretical questions about the revival of specific contextual details as well as more applied questions concerning the role of social schemas, stereotypes, and how such errors can lead to unconscious plagiarism. In the domain of recognition memory and free recall performance, I am conducting studies on issues such as how decision criteria are established and the effect that stimulus characteristics such as context variability can affect subsequent memory performance. Thus, my research interests are broad and my training has been to seek out more than single statements about each of these programs of study. Instead I have been trained to search for the hidden generalizations that bridge these separate domains of inquiry.

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