We are thrilled to announce the addition of two outstanding post-doctoral researchers, Dillon Murphy Ph.D. and Phil Peper Ph.D., to the Memory and Attention Control Laboratory team! Their arrival marks a significant step forward in our ongoing efforts to advance the understanding of cognitive processes and brain function. Check out their links on the ‘Meet the MAC Lab’ page and join us in welcoming them to our dynamic and collaborative research environment!
Graduate Student Xavier Celaya Makes a Recent Publication
Dr. Gene Brewer and Xavier Celaya recently published a methods paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review discussing their investigation into how the sequence of cognitive task batteries used to study individual differences may change the resulting factor structures. Results indicate that the different measurement models were invariant to the three different task sequences.
Read about it here
Acute Pain and Sustained Attention at APA
Dr. Gene Brewer recently attended the American Psychological Association (APA) Convention in Chicago. While at the conference he presented research from Memory & Attention Control Laboratory investigating the affect of acute pain on attention. For those who missed the talk or were unable to attend the conference, here is a copy of the talk.
Thank you to the APA for giving us an opportunity to discuss our research, and thank you as well to those who were in attendance.
Dr. Brewer Discusses the Mandela Effect with Mental Floss
Laboratory Director, Gene Brewer, recently discussed the Mandela Effect with Mental Floss. The author of the article (Jake Rossen) and Gene provide 10 well known examples of the Mandela Effect. You can read the full article here and see if you have fallen prey to examples listed.
Science Behind Leaving Children in Hot Cars
Laboratory Director, Gene Brewer, was recently interviewed by ABC15 Arizona about how memory failures can lead to leaving children in the backseat of cars. You can read the full article here.
Breaking for Social Media
Matt Robison, Memory and Attention Control Lab Post-Doc, was recently featured in an Arizona State University article discussing attention, the locus coeruleus (LC), and Arizona Cardinal football.
Click the link to read the full interview or watch part of the interview below.
Can social media breaks make you more productive?
Psychonomics 2018: New Orleans, LA
Another annual Psychonomics Society meeting has come and gone. This years event took place in New Orleans, Lousiana from November 15-18th. Blake Elliott presented a poster about value directed encoding and retrieval. His poster was nominated for and won APA Division 3’s Poster Contest. Post-doc Matthew Robison and graduate student Derek Ellis both presented posters. Lab alum, and graduate students, Peter Whitehead (Duke) and Anne Vogel (University of Mississippi) shared posters as well. Lastly, Hunter Ball (University of Texas: Arlington) helped close out Psychonomics with by giving a talk about his recent work on prospective memory.
Blake E Psychonomics 2018 Poster
Derek E Psychonomics 2018 Poster
Matthew R Psychonomics 2018 Poster
Anne V Psychonomics 2018 Poster
Peter W Psychonomics 2018 Poster
Hunter B Psychonomics 2018 Talk
Weather Channel Documentary About Hot Car Deaths
Fantastic group of individuals putting in the effort to understand and reduce hot car deaths.
This past week representatives from Weather.com came to Arizona State University and interviewed several researchers that study various aspects of hot car deaths for an upcoming documentary. Our laboratory researches cognitive failures leading to prospective memory errors. Prospective memory is defined as one’s ability to remember to complete intentions in the future. Many hot car death situations involve a parent or caretaker having a prospective memory failure and forgetting their child. Therefore, understanding the nature of these failures can help avoid tragedies and save lives. Nice work team!
Also , check out the incredible work on this topic from Jennifer Vanos in our School of Sustainability. Jennifer studies heat and how it affects the human body.
https://sustainability.asu.edu/person/jennifer-vanos/
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=lkQilX8AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
Graduation Day!
With the closing of another great academic year we want to take a moment to say congratulations and highlight some of our graduating honor students. The three students we seek to honor are Aaron Cohen (second from left), Mohitha Obulasetty (right), and Krysten Sullivan (second from right).
Aaron’s honors thesis examined how motivation influences problem solving accuracy and metacognitive monitoring and control processes during problem solving.
Mohitha’s honors thesis examined how binaural beats augment sustained attention. Mohitha’s thesis was the first preregistered honors thesis from the MACLab!
Krysten’s honors thesis examined how different confidence scales impacts recognition memory decision-making using signal detection parameters d’ and c.
Coming soon to a broadcast near you
Last week local evening news reporter and weather anchor Kristy Siefkin visited the Memory and Attention Control Laboratory to talk with Gene Brewer about the Mandela Effect.
This post will be updated with the video segment after it airs, but in the meantime here are Kristy and Brian Kae of Fox 10 news wearing our new 256-electrode EGI caps.
Update 7/27/2017: The segment aired on 7/24/2017 and here is a link to view the segment and write-up.
The Memory & Attention Control Laboratory 