Reading and Memory Lab

Crystal Cortes - Graduate Teaching Assistant
crystal.cortes@mavs.uta.edu

Crystal joined Dr. Odegard’s lab in Fall 2007, shortly after receiving her BS in Psychology from UT-Arlington. She conducted her Master’s thesis on strategies that highlight both the positive and negative aspects of normative age-related patterns in human episodic memory. She received her MS in Health Psychology and Neuroscience in Spring 2009, and is currently working toward achieving her PhD. Her research interests include lifespan human learning and memory. Her emphasis is in aging, as well as the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie normal and abnormal changes in aging cognition by measuring the integrity and function of the Hippocampus and Prefrontal Cortex using magnetic resonance imaging techniques and measurements of metabolic biomarkers.

List of current projects:

• Biomarkers of Healthy Cognitive Aging and Response to Cardiovascular Intervention
• Hippocampal Memory Function Project of the Neuroimaging and Biomarker Studies of Gulf War Illness
• Memory and Aging: The Influence of Attention and the Acquisition of New Knowledge at Study on Younger and Older Adults’ Associative Memory
• Memory and Aging: The Implementation of Memory Editing Mechanisms in Younger and Older Adults

Emily Farris - Graduate Teaching Assistant
efarris@uta.edu

Emily graduated summa cum laude from Midwestern State University with a BA in psychology in 2005 prior to completing her MA in clinical/counseling psychology at Midwestern State University in 2007 with a thesis that involved a multidimensional scaling analysis of math anxiety subtypes. She has been a member of Dr. Odegard’s lab since Fall 2007 as she continues to pursue her PhD. Her research interests include the use of MR imaging techniques and more traditional cognitive studies to investigate aspects of cognitive and neurocognitive development throughout the lifespan. Specifically, she has been investigating how the emotional valence and arousal associated with items impacts an individual’s ability to use gist and verbatim processing to recognize previously presented items as well as how this ability develops throughout childhood. She continues to also be involved in investigations of response to intervention in children with developmental dyslexia using a variety of neuroimaging analyses (e.g., fMRI, DTI, and functional connectivity).

List of current projects:

• Investigation of Emotional Memory Processes
• Longitudinal Study of Response to Intervention in Children with Dyslexia
• Compensatory Bilateral Inferior Frontal Activation Observed in Typically Developing Young Adults During Single Word Reading
• Environmental Factors Underlying Response to Intervention: The Role of the Reading Attitudes of Children with Dyslexia and their Parents on Treatment Response

Anna E. Fitzhugh - Graduate Teaching Assistant
anna.fitzhugh@mavs.uta.edu

Anna Fitzhugh earned a B.A. in Psychology in 2006 at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She achieved certification as a Certified Academic Language Practitioner in 2008 before earning her M.A. in Psychology at San Diego State University in 2010. She conducted her Master's thesis project on pre-literate language development, and her current interests include the psychological and neurological mechanisms involved in learning disabilities, particularly dyslexia. She is presently pursuing a Ph.D. in Health Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Current Projects:

• Role of working memory as a predictor of basic reading skills
• Cognitive profiles of dyslexia
• Familial attitudes towards reading in dyslexic and non-impaired readers
• Impact of intensive training on teacher knowledgeability and student outcomes

Haylie Gomez - Graduate Teaching Assistant
haylie.gomez@mavs.uta.edu

Haylie Gomez earned her B.A. in 2006 from Vanderbilt University with a double-major in Psychology and Music. She earned her M.S. at UT Arlington in Spring 2009 while working with Dr. Lauri Jensen-Campbell. During that time she conducted research on the tendency of chronic rejection to negatively influence future perceptions of social interactions. Her current research interests include the interface between social cognitive processes in typically developing children and adults and children and adults with autism. She is investigating the interplay between basic cognitive processes of memory and decision-making, social interactions and the role of biological mechanisms to impact these social cognitive processes.

List of current projects:

• Narrative processing in children and young adults
• Match-mismatch judgments of word and symbol pairs in young adults

Naoko Witzel - Post-doctoral Researcher
naoko@uta.edu

Naoko received her PhD in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) / Cognitive Science in 2010 from the University of Arizona. She joined Dr. Odegard's lab in Fall 2011. Her primary research interest concerns how bilinguals represent first language (L1) and second language (L2) words in memory, and how these L1 and L2 words are processed. She is especially interested in whether different memory systems are involved in the mental representation of L1 and L2 words. She is also interested in the processing of language at the sentence level. She is currently working on a project investigating developmental changes in gist memory.

List of current projects:

• Development of Gist Memory using the Conjunction Error Paradigm

Personal website: www.uta.edu/faculty/naoko