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Karl Szpunar
Harvard University, USA http://karlszpunar.com What does your research focus on? My research interests focus primarily upon, but are not limited to, understanding the cognitive and neural relations that underlie our capacity to remember personal past experiences and imagine personal future experiences. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? That we are able, in a moment’s notice, to mentally transport ourselves to events past (real or imaginary) and future (plausible or implausible) has always greatly fascinated me. Of course, having an interest in something as a graduate student can only get you so far. Luckily, my graduate advisor, Dr.
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Daniel M. Oppenheimer
http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/ What does your research focus on? I dance around a lot of different research areas, but most of them are somehow connected to metacognition, judgment and decision making. How does what we think we know, (and how we think we think) influence the way we make decisions? What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? I wish I had better metacognition about what draws me to these sorts of projects. Really, I just do whatever projects grab my attention. At any given moment, there rarely seems to be any connection between the different projects I’m working on. But when I look back in hindsight there do seem to be common themes.
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Julie Bugg
Washington University, USA What does your research focus on? The primary focus of my research is cognitive control, and age-related changes in control. I am interested in the mechanisms humans use to resolve interference, the interplay of expectancy-driven and stimulus-driven control, the degree to which these mechanisms are impaired versus spared with age, and remediation of age-related cognitive control decline. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? I became interested in cognitive control and the intersection of aging and control during graduate school while reading Hasher and Zacks’ classic work.
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Shana K. Carpenter
Iowa State University, USA http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/~shacarp What does your research focus on? I study techniques and strategies that improve memory. My research so far has focused on the effectiveness of relatively simple mnemonic techniques such as retrieval practice, the optimal scheduling of repeated study sessions, and the best time during which corrective feedback should be given in order to maximize the amount of information that people can remember. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? It was purely by accident that I became fascinated with learning. When I was younger, I didn’t enjoy school at all.
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Simine Vazire
Washington University in St. Louis www.simine.com What does your research focus on? My research examines people's knowledge about their own personalities. Do people know how they behave? Do they know how others see them? I examine the discrepancies between how people see themselves and how others see them, and try to determine who is more accurate. I also examine whether people are aware of these discrepancies, and if so, how do they justify them? Finally, I'm curious about the processes that lead to these discrepancies - why do others sometimes know us better than we know ourselves? What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you?
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Peter Kuppens
University of Leuven, Belgium http://ppw.kuleuven.be/okp/people/Peter_Kuppens/byYearType/ What does your research focus on? I study emotions, specifically I’ve been trying to make sense of the patterns with which our emotions change across time, and what we can learn from them to understand what makes people happy or miserable. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? My answer to the first question is silly: I applied for a PhD position on the topic of anger and got the job.
