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Reasoning & Working Memory

In the Working memory and attention lab, we are interested in working memory and attention, including their relations, how they work in human cognition, as well as mindfulness meditation.  At this point, in our lab, we have the following three projects.

Reasoning and working memory (in collaboration with Dr. Robert Ricco)

We investigate relationships between reasoning and working memory based on the dual process framework (e.g., Kahneman, 2012).  The dual process framework claims that there are two types of processing: Type 1 processing and Type 2 processing.  Type 1 processing is heuristic, intuitive, reflective, and doesn’t require working memory resources, whereas Type 2 processing is algorithmic, logical, reflexive, and requires working memory resources.  We investigate roles of working memory and other thinking abilities and dispositions in various reasoning tasks, including conditional reasoning, denominator neglect, base rate neglect, and so on.Please let us know if you are interested in learning more about this project. If you would like to contribute to this project as a collaborator please email us; if you would like to work on the project as a student research assistant, please fill out our Research Assistant Form