Tip of the Tongue Experiences

Studies have shown that it happens to most people about once a week. Feeling as though the answer is on the tip of your tongue captures the feeling that you can almost but not quite utter the answer to a question. You know you know the answer to the question, but you cannot seem to retrieve the infomation fully. When this frustrated experience occurs, people often say: "Its on the tip of my tongue." As a researcher, I study the types of questions that lead people into this state. My goal is to better understand how people retrieve information successfully and what types of things lead to unsucessful retrieval. I have compared people of many ages in an effort to understand the best way to model how memory and lexical retrieval works.

Eyewitness Memory

How confident can you be when an eyewitness describes a crime scene that they observed? In some cases, not very. My research in this area focuses around the impact of misinformation. The misinformation effect occurs when people incoporate post-event information into their memory of the event itself. Much research has indicated that information presented after the original event can impact on how accurately an eyewitness can recall the event. For example, sometimes eyewitnesses who have viewed crimes will remember that the robber had a mustache simply because someone suggested to them after the event that the robber had a moustache. Understanding what types of conditions are required for eyewitness memory to be more accurate is one of my goals in this research.

Effect of Video games on Adolescents

Highly realistic, extremely aggressive video games are used by many people as entertainment. I am interested in determining if playing these types of video games has a negative impact on adolescents. The media at times has pointed the finger at the entertainment industry, citing violence in games, in movies and on television as the cause of adolescent anger and aggression. Is there any validity to these claims? Is it a video game that causes a young teenager to harm his classmates. In an effort to better understand how video games may influence adolescents, I study them while they are playing video games to determine if the games alter their behavior.

Teaching Scholarship

I also conduct research on teaching methods used in the classroom. I examine the impact of active learning on student performance and retention in the classroom. In conjunction with several colleague, we hope to enhance the teaching in the psychology program at Indiana University Southeast and share this success with others who strive toward the same goals. Currently, we have been working on creating a more interactive learning enviroment in Introductory Psychology classes at our university.