Research
Individual Differences
People differ in how well they can control their own memory. Not everyone forgets the same way, and that variation might tell us something important. One line of work in our lab examines these individual differences, focusing on executive control, the ability to let go of unwanted memories, and the role that context processing plays in this ability.
Our current work focuses on young adults with vulnerability for mental illness, examining how these abilities relate to clinical risk. In the past, this line of research has also included healthy older adults (65+) and young adults who vary in executive control.
Across these populations, we draw on behavioral, eye-tracking, and neural measures to understand how executive control and context processing shape our ability to manage memory.
Selected papers
- Sahakyan, L., Wahlheim, C.N., & Kwapil, T.R. (2023). Mnemonic discrimination deficits in multidimensional schizotypy. Hippocampus, 1-15. PDF
- Sahakyan, L., Meller, T., Evermann, U., Schmitt, S., Pfarr, J., Sommer, J., Kwapil, T. R., Nenadic, I., (2020). Anterior vs. posterior hippocampal subfields in an extended psychosis phenotype of multidimensional schizotypy in a nonclinical sample. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 47, pp. 207-218. PDF
- Sahakyan, L., Kwapil, T. R., & Jiang*, L. (2019). Differential Impairment of Positive and Negative Schizotypy in List-Method and Item-Method Directed Forgetting. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149, pp. 368-381. PDF
- Sahakyan, L. & Kwapil, T. R. (2019). Hits and false alarms in recognition memory show differential impairment in positive and negative schizotypy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 128, 633-643 PDF
* indicates graduate student authors from this lab