Jason Reimer
Contact
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Bio
Professor of Psychology
Co-Director of the Learning Research Institute
Education
Ph.D., Developmental Psychology with emphasis in Cognitive Development, University of Nebraska - Lincoln
M.A., Experimental Psychology, University of Nebraska
B.A., Psychology, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Courses/Teaching
PSYC 3311: Research Methods in Psychology
PSYC 4431: Experimental Psychology - Development
Research and Teaching Interests
Executive Functioning and Cognitive Control in Children and Adults
This line of research examines the structure, development, and measurement of cognitive control in children and adults. Cognitive control supports the inhibition of prepotent responses, the use of internally maintained information to guide thought and action, and the planning of goal-directed behavior. My work in this area uses psychological experiments that combine eye tracking with computerized cognitive tasks to index executive functions such as attention, cognitive inhibition, and working memory. Analytically, this work relies on quantitative statistical modeling such as regression, and recent work has drawn on computational machine learning methods to better characterize the mechanisms that may support controlled processing.
Findings from this line of work suggest that age-related gains in cognitive control during childhood are accompanied by improvements in the representation and maintenance of goal information, and that the physical structure of events encountered in the environment influences the mode of control that participants adopt. Ongoing work extends this question to how proactive control is implemented, and suggests that proactive control may be less unitary than often assumed, with gaze-based implementation strategies that appear dissociable and differentially related to working memory capacity. Work with collaborators has also produced a mobile measure of selective attention that may be useful to researchers investigating the structure and development of controlled processing.
Visual Word Recognition and the Development of Skilled-Reading
The overall goal of my research program in this area is to identify the nature of visual word recognition processes in adults and then apply this knowledge in an attempt to better understand how these same processes develop in less-skilled readers. The specific goals of this research program are to (a) better understand the cognitive processes that underlie visual word recognition in both skilled and less-skilled readers, (b) examine how visual word recognition processes change as reading skill/age increases, (c) develop a model of reading acquisition that can account for changes in lexical processing as reading skill improves, and (d) apply my research findings to reading instruction in the classroom.