Affiliated Faculty and Staff
Sara Cordes
Dr. Cordes directs the Infant and Child Cognition Lab in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. Her research focuses on understanding how young children learn about number, space, and time. In particular, studies in her lab explore how the acquisition of mathematical concepts may be influenced by distinct social contexts, linguistic experiences, and beliefs about learning and mathematics.
David Miele
Dr. Miele directs the Motivation, Metacognition, and Learning (MML) Laboratory at Lynch School of Education and Human Development. He investigates students’ beliefs about their ability, learning, and motivation, and examines how these beliefs influence their engagement in academic tasks. At the broadest level, he is interested in what it takes for students to become effective, independent learners.
Marina Vasilyeva
Dr. Vasilyeva researches cognitive development and learning at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development. Her investigations explore the relation between environmental input children receive at home or in school and the growth of their language, spatial and mathematical skills. Her recent studies focused on the possibility of improving math learning outcomes in young students. This line of work includes (a) developing new instructional approaches that utilize the link between children’s spatial and mathematical reasoning and (b) identifying cognitive factors, such as attention and memory, that may moderate the effects of math instruction on children’s learning.
Samantha Hutchinson
Samantha Hutchinson is the Research Coordinator for the BC Consortium for Translational Research on Learning and Memory. She graduated from Skidmore College with a BA in Psychology in 2020. Her previous work broadly focused on how young children learn about the world and her senior thesis assessed how adult beliefs about cognitive development vary across experience and expertise. She is particularly excited about the work of this consortium to bridge the gap between research in learning and memory processes and educational settings.
Elizabeth Kensinger
Dr. Kensinger directs the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. Her research uses behavioral and brain imaging methods to understand how adults learn and retrieve information. She is particularly interested in how factors such as emotion, motivation, and self-relevance of material affect how information is learned and remembered.
Maureen Ritchey
Dr. Ritchey directs the Memory Modulation Lab in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. In her research, she uses the tools of cognitive neuroscience to investigate the human brain processes supporting episodic memory. She is particularly interested in the brain networks involved in reconstructing the details of memories, and how these networks are modulated by affective and contextual states.
Jaclyn Ford
Dr. Ford is a Research Assistant Professor in the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. Her research examines the effects of emotion and social relevance on memory retrieval processes, focusing on how individual differences in retrieval goals and context may modulate these effects. She utilizes behavioral and neuroimaging methods to characterize these changes in an attempt to better support memory retrieval in individuals with memory impairments.
Cortney Stedman
Cortney Stedman is the lab coordinator for the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. The research that she helps conduct studies the interaction between the effects of emotion and age on memory. Cortney received her BS in psychology from the University of Minnesota in 2020. Her honors thesis examined the relationships between knowledge gaps and curiosity, and between curiosity and memory.
Elida Veléz Laski
Dr. Laski directs the Thinking and Learning Lab at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development. Her research lies at the intersection of cognitive science and education. Her investigations focus on understanding which features of instructional materials and interactions are helpful or harmful to learning and which materials are best suited for teaching different concepts. Through these lines of inquiry, the lab works to develop new instructional materials and frameworks for mathematics learning by leveraging and promoting key cognitive processes, such as inhibitory control, encoding, analogical comparison, and spatial reasoning.
Scott Slotnick
Dr. Slotnick directs the Memory, Attention, and Perception (MAP) Lab in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. He investigates the cognitive neuroscience of visual memory and visual attention, capitalizing on the well–known functional–anatomic organization of visual perception. The MAP lab employs behavioral studies, computational modeling, fMRI, EEG, and TMS, to shed light on the complex nature of processing in the human mind and brain.
Preston Thakral
Dr. Thakral is the Operating Director and Senior Research Scientist of the Human Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Boston College. His research focuses on understanding how episodic memory depends on flexible constructive processes (e.g., the retrieval and the flexible recombination of the who, what, when, and where information from a past event). In particular, studies in his lab have revealed a broader role for episodic retrieval in supporting other 'adaptive' cognitive functions that do not require episodic memory, but may still involve constructive processes, such as divergent creative thinking and means-end problem solving. His lab utilizes a variety of cognitive neuroscience techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, event-related potentials, and eye-tracking, along with behavioral methods.