Experimental Psychology Graduate Program - Cognitive Psychology Area

Philip I. Pavlik Jr., Director
Phone: 901.678.2326
Office: Psyc 434
Email: ppavlik@memphis.edu

A cognitive psychology specialization involves training in three primary areas: General cognition, psycholinguistics and discourse, and learning technologies. Training in this program integrates theory and data from all three emphases. Training also draws upon the Institute for Intelligent Systems (IIS). This active cognitive science research community includes faculty from the departments of Psychology, Communication Sciences and Disorders, Computer Science, Education, Educational Technology, Engineering, English, Mathematical Sciences, Philosophy, and Physics. We have a highly active and interactive program with two weekly meetings, the Cognitive Brownbag Series on Mondays at 12:30 pm and the Cognitive Science Seminar on Wednesdays at 4 pm, both in the FedEx Institute of Technology.

1. General cognitive science This research emphasizes the cognitive processes used in encoding, storing, and retrieving linguistic and non-linguistic information. Within this emphasis, students and faculty collaborate on several topics, including:

• motor, language, and visual dynamics
• memory, knowledge, and skill acquisition
• emotions and motivation
• social cognition
• individual differences
• symbolic and embodied cognition
• computational and mathematical modeling

2. Psycholinguistics and discourse. This emphasis involves the processes and knowledge structures used in understanding and producing written and spoken language. A related goal is to better understand comprehension processes at all ages. Topics of interest in this area include:

• discourse processing
• semantics and pragmatics
• conversation and dialogue
• figurative language
• linguistic corpus analysis
• text coherence
• multimodal communication

3. Learning technologies. In this emphasis, faculty and students investigate how recent developments in computer science and student modeling can be applied to learning, particularly the learning of complex domains of knowledge (e.g., physics). The overarching goal of this research is to apply principles of cognitive science to educational practice via technology to create automated learning environments. Research topics include:

• intelligent tutoring systems
• multimedia and hypermedia
• learning from text
• learning from multimedia
• student modeling and adaptive problem selection
• human-computer interaction
• human-to-human tutoring
• individual differences in learning

Primary Affiliates

Cheryl Bowers, Ph.D.
Email: cbowers@memphis.edu -  UM Profile

Gina Caucci, Ph.D. *
Email: gcaucci@memphis.edu - UM Profile

Stephanie Huette, Ph.D. *
Email: shuette@memphis.edu - UM Profile

Roger Kreuz, Ph.D. *
Email: rkreuz@memphis.edu - UM Profile

Shelbi Kuhlmann, Ph.D. (also IIS) *
Email: s.kuhlmann@memphis.edu - UM Profile

Andrew Olney, Ph.D. (also IIS) *
Email: aolney@memphis.edu - UM Profile

Philip I. Pavlik Jr., Ph.D. (also IIS) *
Email: ppavlik@memphis.edu - UM Profile

John Sabatini, Ph.D. (also IIS) *
Email: jpsbtini@memphis.edu - UM Profile

Jia Wei Zhang, Ph.D. *
Email: jzhang11@memphis.edu - UM Profile

* For students interested in graduate school please contact potential advisors at email(s) above  

Emeritus Affiliates

Arthur C. Graesser, Ph.D.
Email: graesser@memphis.edu - UM Profile