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Faculty Mentors for the 2009 Summer Program
Dr.
Deana Davalos investigates temporal
processing, aspects of cognitive aging, and cognitive processes in
clinical populations. One line of research focuses on understanding the
development of time processing abilities over the life span. Of
particular interest is the relationship between one's ability to process
time accurately and higher cognitive skills such as planning, sequencing,
and executive functioning. Dr. Davalos also studies time processing in
clinical populations. Her research involves behavioral testing, EEG, and
neuropsychological testing. Dr. Davalos conducts her research in a
facility suitable for both behavioral and EEG/ERP studies. She also
maintains active collaborations with the University of Colorado Health
Sciences Center and the Center for Neurorehabilitiation Services.
Dr.
Edward DeLosh studies various
aspects of human learning and memory. One line of research focuses on how
the distinctive features of items versus the relationship between items
influence memory. This issue is considered as it relates to phenomenon
such as the bizarreness effect, word frequency effect, generation effect,
and false recognition. Other research interests examine how study
schedules (spacing vs. massing) and the act of retrieving information
(generating it on your own or being tested on it) affect subsequent
memory for that information. An additional line of research considers the
role of memory for individual instances versus abstraction in conceptual
behavior such as prediction, interpolation, and extrapolation. Although
much of Dr. DeLosh’s work is conducted with young adults, these and
other topics in are also considered as they apply to healthy aging.
Dr.
David McCabe investigates human
memory, as well. Questions addressed in the lab include: Is working
memory capacity, i.e., the ability to concurrently maintain and
manipulate information, related to episodic memory? Can people accurately
report when they are experiencing conscious recollection? Are people
accurate in their assessments of how much they can remember over the
short term? Experimental and individual differences methodologies are
used to study episodic memory, working memory capacity, and metamemory.
Much of this research focuses on adult age differences in memory
performance.
Dr.
Patrick Monnier is interested in how
humans perceive the world, and in particular, how we perceive colors. He
is especially interested in the influence of context on color appearance,
what is commonly referred to as chromatic induction. In this work, Dr.
Monnier uses psychophysics to make quantitative estimates of color
appearance using well-calibrated computer monitors and by having
observers make color-matching judgments. The quantitative measurements
are then used to deduce the neural substrate that gives rise to these percepts.
Another area of interest is visual attention, especially how color can
guide visual search. A practical application of Dr. Monnier's work is the
development of better interfaces where color may be used to code
information efficiently while minimizing errors.
Dr.
Matthew Rhodes studies human memory,
with a major focus on how subjective experience is related to memory
performance, particularly for tasks such as predicting future memory
performance. Other work examines subjective experience and its relation
to memory accuracy, including how it pertains to aging populations. Dr.
Rhodes also maintains lines of work examining memory for faces,
predictors of individual differences in memory accuracy, and recognition memory processes.
Dr.
Carol Seger studies how people learn
about patterns present in the world, including concepts, categories,
visual patterns, sequences, rules, and skills. She is interested in how
patterns are represented in the mind and brain, how they affect our
behavior, and how their representations are changed by experience. Much
of the current research in her lab examines how the basal ganglia
interact with cerebral cortexto subserve learning. In addition to
behavioral techniques, her lab utilizes functional magnetic resonance
imaging and electroencephalography.
Dr.
Lucy Troup investigates how the
brain processes visual information. She is particularly interested in how
low level perceptual representation is linked to high-level conscious
perception. Recent work includes using event-related potentials to
investigate the nature of face perception and expertise in the brain.
Other research includes using EEG to investigate how information about
the visual image is bound together to form a complete perception (for
example, how color and form information is bound together). In
collaboration with colleagues in the Department of Computer Science, Dr.
Troup is also involved in research evaluating face recognition
algorithms, as well as how understanding human vision can help create
artificial computer vision systems.
Dr. Vicki
Volbrecht investigates the neural
processes mediating color perception. The major focus of her research is
the study of color vision in the peripheral retina and the differences between
foveal and peripheral color perception. Overall, her work seeks to
assess the role of rods in color perception using bleach and
no-bleach procedures. This work is conducted on a Maxwellian-view
optical system interfaced with a computer. All psychophysical observers
are tested for color vision deficiencies using pseudisochromatic plates,
several panel tests, and Neitz anomaloscope.
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