The Memory and Attention Laboratory at the University of South Dakota is part of the Human Factors & Applied Cognition program in the Department of Psychology. We study memory, attention, and multitasking in humans using behavioral experiments, eye tracking, pupillometry, and computational modeling. Our work informs current theories of how working memories are formed, the causes of forgetting, and the relationship between working memory and higher-order cognitive behavior.
What do we study?
How are durable working memories created?
Our initial sensory representations are fleeting and forgotten in a matter of seconds, at most. Our work has demonstrated that even the memories we intend to maintain are lost in a similar fashion unless some time is given for attention to dwell on the internal sensory representation. This attentional dwell leads to a more robust trace that is resistant to future memory decay. We call this process short-term consolidation. At present we are investigating the nature of this process, called short-term consolidation, and it's contribution to the creation of a memory trace within working memory, the relationship between short-term consolidation and a phenomenon known as the attentional blink, and several other questions related to these processes.
When and why does memory suffer during multitasking?
In our approach, impairment in working memory performance across multitasking conditions reflects a failure to consolidate a memory representation to its standard single-task level due to the perceived difficulty of current multitasking demands. In typical approaches, working memory impairment while multitasking reflects incremental memory trace disruption from concurrent processing. Our idea is that multitasking is not causing forgetting, but rather is preventing standard memory creation processes. We are currently demonstrating this theoretical position through multiple experimental approaches.
How does the representation in memory change (or not) across tasks and memory materials?
Is the structure of what you remember the same when remembering items composed of varying features in varying contexts? We use computational models to track the structure and quality of visual memories. By varying what we ask participants to remember, the nature of the memory task, and concurrent task demands we can observe changes in the underlying memory representation structure. Our innovation is focusing on stimulus specific variance in our models to differentiate fine-detailed memory and categorical-gist memory. This work has important impacts on the quality and accuracy of memory performance in applied contexts as well as informing theories of working memory and cognitive processes during mental work.
Exploring Everyday Cognition
Recent work in our lab suggests that many of the assumptions made about how memory works in laboratory studies may not apply to everyday life activities. To address this we are exploring tasks at the intersection of typical laboratory task and daily living tasks. While most researchers use an ideal observer model of understanding cognitive processing, we think that individuals are rarely ideal in their cognitive functions during activities of daily living. This has motivated a new focus on "bad" participants and performance. We seek to better understand the typical failures in cognitive function as a way to better understand how we can improve cognitive performance in daily life without asking individuals to just "get good".