Name: John R. Aiello, PhD
School: Rutgers University (NJ)
Contact Information: jack.aiello@gmail.com

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
My research includes inquiries in three related directions. First, we study the role of feedback in the process by which people regulate and control their social interaction.

Second, the technological advances and computer software development in the workplace have made it possible for employers to monitor the work of many individuals and we study the effects of this "electronic presence," using a social facilitation framework.  Other studies investigate the effect on supervisors of "continually available" performance information.

Third, our research investigates telecommuting, virtual environments, and virtual  eams, the impacts of a multitasking environment, the effect of interruptions(via various channels)on task performance, and personality predictors of performance. Most recently, research has focused on leadership factors associated with recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Name: Jeanette Altarriba, PhD
School: University at Albany, State University of New York
Contact Information: ja087@albany.edu
             (518) 442-5004

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
The program of research at the Cognition and Language Laboratory at the University at Albany has two primary aims: To examine the ways in which bilingual speakers acquire, use, and retrieve their knowledge of their languages; and (2) To examine how emotional stimuli is represented and used in both monolingual and bilingual speakers.  It is curious to note that while a bilingual speaker can use one language and then another, seemingly without confusing the two, there are also instances where knowledge of one language can affect processing in a second language.  We explore the ways in which languages can interact in a variety of cognitive paradigms including Stroop tasks, Simon tasks, priming, and other attentional tasks in order to uncover the ways in which language fluency, proficiency, and use affect language processing overall.  Further, it is interesting to note that while emotionally-related stimuli (e.g., words such as love, joy, prison) are used in a variety of settings, these words can carry different levels of arousal and intensity in a native language as compared to a second language.  We strive to understand the ways in which language, emotion, and cognition interact in both basic and applied research settings.

Name: Catherine Meige Arrington, PhD
School: Lehigh University (PA)
Contact Information: kate.arrington@lehigh.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
Human cognition is noteworthy for its flexibility in adapting to changes in external environments and internal goals.  This ability is particularly apparent in multitask environments.  Executive control processes are involved in selection, implementation, and monitoring of other cognitive processes in such environments. In my lab, we examine how internal and external factors influence task performance in multitask environments, in particular the choice to perform one task versus another.  Internal factors include the representation of specific tasks and the larger multitask environment, the executive processes involved in preparing the cognitive system to optimally perform a task, and the control processes engaged in selecting a task from among multiple available behavioral pathways.  External factors include the availability and salience of external stimuli.

Name: Shawn R. Charlton, PhD
School: University of Central Arkansas
Contact Information: SCharlton@uca.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
Have you ever wondered why waking up at 5:00 AM to workout/study sounds brilliant at 4:00 PM the night before, but crazy at 4:00 AM the morning of?  This change in preference is irrational (what is preferred at time A should be preferred at time B), but very common!  One cause of this behavior is temporal discounting: the idea that outcomes are perceived as less valuable, difficult, or costly the greater the delay to their occurrence.  In my Behavioral and Social Decisions Laboratory we explore the mechanisms of temporal discounting as well as its real-world significance, such as its role in substance abuse and contexts requiring social cooperation (e.g., voting, giving to charity, environmental conservationism).

Name: Andres De Los Reyes, PhD
School: University of Maryland at College Park
Contact Information: adelosreyes@psyc.umd.edu
              (301) 405-7049

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
Andres De Los Reyes received his Ph.D. in 2008 from Yale University and his internship training at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Institute for Juvenile Research. His research program incorporates clinical, social, developmental, and cognitive psychology areas to understand why different measurements of behavior yield different conclusions in research and how these differences influence the science behind identifying effective treatments. He is also interested in what happens to children when the people in their lives do not see important aspects of children’s behavior in the same way. Recent projects include: (1) developing a structured interview of caregiver-child discrepancies in perceived daily life events, (2) parent-child rating discrepancies of parental monitoring as predictors of juvenile delinquency, and (3) how parent-teacher rating discrepancies of disruptive behavior in preschoolers map onto laboratory observations of preschoolers’ disruptive behavior. Lear more at Dr. De Los Reyes’ faculty webpage or at his lab’s webpage

Name: Lisabeth F. DiLalla, PhD
School: Southern Illinois University
Contact Information: ldilalla@siu.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
Dr. Lisabeth DiLalla, Ph.D., is a Professor in the School of Medicine and the Department of Psychology at Southern Illinois University. Dr. DiLalla tests 1- to 5-year-old twin and triplet families in her lab to assess children’s cognitive skills, interpersonal behaviors, temperament, and family environment.  Her research on preschoolers has focused on aggressive and cooperative peer behaviors, behavioral adjustment to school, and play and imagination. Additionally, parent-child interaction styles are videotaped and coded to examine their inter-relationship with children’s social development.  Other research interests include delinquency and cognitive development. Dr. DiLalla focuses on twins in her research in order to better understand the contributions of genes and environment to the behaviors she studies.

Name: Linda A. Henkel, PhD
School: Fairfield University (CT)
Contact Information: lhenkel@mail.fairfield.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
How is it that people remember events that never happened, why do they forget events that did happen, and when do they misremember details about what they experienced or how they experienced it? The imperfections in memory are not random, but follow predictable patterns based on cognitive principles. I am a cognitive psychologist who specializes in research on memory errors and distortions.  I have published research on topics such as confusions between real and imagined memories, self-enhancing memory biases, and cognitive aging. I also study cognition in applied contexts, such as how jury members are able to intentionally forget information they are asked to disregard, how information regarding disputed confessions weigh into their verdicts, and how various factors such as presentation of photographs may lead to false confessions.

Name: Alishia Huntoon, PhD
School: Oregon Institute of Technology
Contact Information: alishia.huntoon@oit.edu
            (541) 885-1673

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
My research interests cover many topics related to social psychology.  As our world is becoming smaller and more interconnected, how we operate with one another and cooperate will impact the world to come.  Prosocial issues, such as conservation and volunteering, are very important in our society and expand beyond our own towns, states, and countries.  There are many useful influence techniques uncovered by research that can aid us in increasing these prosocial behaviors.  Situational factors are important and interesting, however, so are personality variables.  I am also interested in personality research that may tie into prosocial behaviors and social influence, as well as a topic on its own.  Additionally, I am interested in gender and human sexuality issues.

Name: Ted Jaeger, PhD
School: Westminster College (MO)
Contact Information: ted.jaeger@westminster-mo.edu
             (573) 592-6120

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
For thirty years Ted Jaeger and his students have been studying visual illusions. Rather than regard illusions as visual mistakes, Ted believes they are quite common and reflect regularly occurring visual processes. Accordingly, Ted and his students are inventing new illusions such as the one created by this Mach pattern of “A”s:

In the lab, the third “A” from the left is seen as smallest and the third “A” from the right is seen as largest. This illusion suggests that: (1) visual neurons represent the size of the “A”s by frequency of response and (2) the misperceptions of the size of the “A”s is created by inhibitory interactions among these neurons. Ted and his students are now determining if these neural interactions can account for classical illusions as well.

Name: Lori James, PhD
School: University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Contact Information: ljames@uccs.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
Dr. Lori James is a faculty member in the psychology department at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. She is a cognitive psychologist with research interests in memory, language, and the impact of age on these abilities. Most of Dr. James' recent projects involve comparing young and older adults’ ability to learn proper names for newly-encountered individuals and assessing the impact of various experimental manipulations on the difficulty of name learning. She is also interested in exploring the causes of age-related declines in the ability to retrieve and produce names of well-known individuals. Other interests include tip-of-the-tongue experiences (when you know that you know a word, but cannot produce it right now) and how the ability to communicate effectively changes across the lifespan.

Name: Dawn M. McBride, PhD
School: Illinois State University
Contact Information: dmmcbri@ilstu.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
My research interests involve automatic forms of memory, which are used in situations where people are influenced by their memories without their awareness or intention to do so. My study of automatic memory has included implicit memory tasks (memory tests without reference to the study episode), false memory (where false memories are induced experimentally without the subject being aware that the memory is a false memory), and prospective memory (where cues in our environment may contribute to our remembering to perform a task at a future time). Many of my studies have examined forgetting in these forms of memory to better understand effects of delay on memory and compare different forms of memory in their forgetting dynamics. I have also studied the picture superiority effect (better memory for pictures than words) in the context of these forms of memory.

Name: Melanie C. Page, PhD
School: Oklahoma State University
Contact Information: melanie.page@okstate.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
My research interests are all centered around the theme of prevention, intervention, and evaluation research. A concern of researchers in prevention is that children grow into healthy, well-adjusted adults. I am currently involved in several projects. My major project is looking at decreasing childhood overweight through family and peer interventions (FiSH project) with colleagues in HDFS. I also look at body image in college students. In addition to looking at correlates of body image, we are looking at ways to better assess this construct, especially in diverse populations. Finally, as a quantitative psychologist, I also have the opportunity to work with a variety of research teams, including looking at family and child functioning in chronic illness, family functioning in Head Start programs, and girls’ and women’s achievements in math and science. Students can design projects related to extant data sets or they can design a new project that includes data collection.

Name: Nicole Prause, PhD
School: Idaho State University
Contact Information: nprause@isu.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
The Sexual Psychophysiology and Affective Neuroscience (SPAN) Laboratory uses psychophysiological measures (EEG, ERP, temperature, plethysmography) and time series analyses (wavelet, math modeling, digital signal processing) to investigate questions concerning sexual functioning, sexual risk taking, and the effects of alcohol on each. Please visit www.span-lab.com for more information about the current research projects.

Name: Mark S. Schmidt, PhD
School: Columbus State University (GA)
Contact Information: schmidt_mark@colstate.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
My research program addresses the interface of biology and cognition. I am currently correlating spatial and memory abilities with the 2D:4D finger length ratio, an indicator of prenatal androgen exposure. I am interested in numerosity perception in both human and non-human animals. We recently studied lateralization of numerosity perception and found a small right hemisphere advantage. I plan a follow-up study using event-related potentials of the brain (ERPs). We also recently completed a study of the ability of rats to acquire conceptual two-choice number discriminations. The rats acquired discriminations in the range of 2-6, including a difficult 4:5 discrimination. I am also interested in studying the effects of putative cognition-enhancing drugs on learning and memory using rats.

Name: Georgene L. Troseth, PhD
School: Vanderbilt University (TN)
Contact Information: georgene.troseth@vanderbilt.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
Why do toddlers learn less from a person on video than they do if the person is present? On the one hand, watching a person on TV seems similar to watching that person “face-to-face”; the person could provide the same information (such as new vocabulary words) in either case.  On the other hand, a person on TV cannot respond to a viewing child or share attention to an object of interest to the child.  My research suggests that very young children’s reliance on social cues (such as eye gaze and contingent responding) affects their learning from video.  Three other current/upcoming projects in my lab involve diverse topics: the responses of very young children with autism to people who are present and people on video; picture processing, visual spatial ability, and jigsaw puzzle skill in individuals with Prader-Willi syndrome; the effect of video games on navigation and visual-spatial processing.  In general, my research focuses on young children’s understanding and use of symbolic artifacts (e.g., pictures, video images, and scale models).

Name: Michelle Verges, PhD
School: Indiana University South Bend
Contact Information: mverges@iusb.edu
             (574) 520-4593

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
My research investigates processing mechanisms underlying knowledge representation using a diverse set of experimental methods and theoretical approaches from several fields of study, including social psychology, linguistics, and philosophy. Given this broad overview, I am primarily interested in three lines of research: 1) the role of perceptual symbol systems on spatial attention and mental imagery; 2) the role of affective processing on mental representations; and 3) the application of cognitive/experimental methods to the study of environmental perception and behavior.  These three areas of research converge on a unifying theme to understand how people represent conceptual and affective information about the natural world, which may yield implications for environmental conservation behaviors.

Name: Jeffrey B. Wagman, PhD
School: Illinois State University
Contact Informationjeffreywagman@ilstu.edu
             (309) 438-7888

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
Success in goal-directed behaviors—whether they are as complicated as landing an airplane or as simple as reaching for a cup of coffee—requires that the perceptual systems provide a person with information about (a) whether that behavior is possible and (b) how to control the movements of their body such that the behavior is performed. My research is directed on understanding how it is that the perceptual systems allow people to perform such goal-directed behaviors. Ongoing projects in my lab are specifically focused on investigating whether people are aware of their own abilities to perform goal-directed behaviors (even when such abilities change over time), why hand-held objects feel they way they do, and how (and why) perceptual skills improve with practice.