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Research Interests

I am a cognitive psychologist studying the dynamic interaction between attention and memory, with special emphasis on individual differences. I use experimental, correlational, and experience-sampling methods to explore 4 central questions:

  1. How do individuals control attention, in selectively processing goal-relevant information amidst external distractions and task-unrelated thoughts, in processing multiple information sources simultaneously, or in switching between different information sources or task objectives?
  2. What are the consequences of attention-control failures for remembering, comprehending, reasoning, and goal-directed action?
  3. To what degree does maintaining information in active memory constrain our ability to focus attention and thought, and to control action?
  4. Why do “span” tests of working-memory capacity (WMC) do such a good job of predicting individual differences in general cognitive ability?

In short, my research explores the nature of WMC's predictive power, in order to understand cognitive individual differences and the functioning of the core attention and memory processes that are broadly important to “real world” cognition. My recent experience-sampling work on mind wandering, moreover, has begun to explore WMC and its consequences outside the lab, by measuring people's susceptibility to distraction as they go about their daily lives.

Although a surprising proportion of our mental life and behavior is automatic and unconscious, cognitive control (or "executive control") remains important to success in complex cognitive activities, such as solving new problems and avoiding mental errors. For example, failures to counteract habitual response tendencies may yield consequences as mundane as arriving at home without having picked up the dry cleaning, or as tragic as accidentally leaving a toddler strapped into a car seat to eventually die of heat stroke. My research program attempts to understand the volitional control of thought and behavior by studying the attention and memory processes that make such control possible but also are disturbingly susceptible to disruption and failure.