Cognitive Psychology

Memory and Attention Control Processes ***

Dr. Hunter Ball, Associate Professor

Dr. Ball’s research investigates the memory and attention control processes involved in the planning and coordination of future actions (i.e., prospective memory), maintenance of goal-relevant information (i.e., working memory), encoding and retrieval of information in long-term memory (i.e., episodic memory), and monitoring and regulation of one’s own cognition (i.e., metamemory). Within each of these domains, a central question concerns age-related changes in these processes.

Neural-Net Modeling and Decision Making

Daniel Levine, Professor of Research

Dr. Levine's laboratory deals with both experimental and theoretical studies of decision making, cognitive-emotional interactions, and cognitive dissonance.

Current research projects include:

• Simulated gambling tasks in which the participant has to decide between two alternatives that provide different probabilities of winning or losing different amounts of virtual money. Dr. Levine and his students look at the effects of various personality variables on gambling choices. They also consider the effect of how the alternatives are presented and how preferences are elicited.
• Studying how emotion contributes to perceived value of resources. Responses of the same participants are compared on two analogous tasks, both involving an unexpected loss after a sequence of gains.
• Studying different methods people use to reduce cognitive dissonance. Typically, cognitive dissonance studies assess the degree to which people change relatively trivial attitudes or beliefs to align with their behavior.

The laboratory also has a long-term goal of understanding how interactions among several brain regions (frontal lobes, amygdala, basal ganglia, etc.) contribute to emotionally influenced decision making. The laboratory is involved in collaborative brain imaging research with UT Southwestern to examine relationships between brain activation and decision style. The lab also has a history of neural network modeling of cognition and behavior.

For information about applying to work in Dr. Levine’s lab, contact him at levine@uta.edu or 817-272-3598.

Spatial Cognition and Navigational Neuroscience (SCANN)

Dr. Steven Weisberg, Assistant Professor

Dr. Steven Weisberg is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Director of the Spatial Cognition and Navigational Neuroscience Lab at the University of Texas at Arlington. His research examines how people learn, remember, and navigate through space — why some individuals are better navigators than others, how spatial behavior can be improved, and why navigation abilities decline with age and Alzheimer’s disease. By combining behavioral experiments, virtual reality, neuroimaging, and real-world measures of mobility, the SCANN Lab seeks to understand the cognitive and neural systems that support successful navigation across the adult lifespan.

Psychophysiological Research in Memory, Motivation, and Attention

Dr. Ashley L. Miller, Assistant Professor

Dr. Ashley L. Miller is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and director of the Psychophysiological Research in Memory, Motivation, & Attention (PRiMMA) Lab. She is broadly interested in why individuals differ in memory and attention abilities, as well as the factors that shape fluctuations in performance within individuals over time.

Dr. Miller’s work integrates behavioral and physiological approaches to identify the mechanisms that govern how attention is deployed in the moment, with a particular focus on the ability to sustain and regulate attentional effort both within and across tasks. She also examines how these mechanisms relate to broader attention control processes, such as goal maintenance and conflict resolution; constraint and restraint; and proactive and reactive control.

Given the multifaceted nature of attention, Dr. Miller’s ongoing projects examine how motivational factors (e.g., self-efficacy, goals, curiosity) and affective factors (e.g., acute and chronic stress) influence specific components of attention and how they interact to support successful learning and real-world performance. Additional research considers whether these effects vary across the lifespan, including how older adults may compensate for declines in controlled processing.