Jason Reimer
Contact
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
On sabbatical during the Fall 2024
Research and Teaching Interests
Executive Functioning and Cognitive Control in Children and Adults
With this line of research, I am interested in better understanding the structure, development, and measurement of cognitive control in children and young adults. Cognitive control is an important cognitive function used often in everyday activities. This function involves the inhibition of highly automatic responses, the use of information to control thought and action, and planning. My research in this area entails conducting psychological experiments that utilize eye tracking technology and computerized cognitive tasks to measure executive functions such as attention, cognitive inhibition, and working memory. My published work in this area has established that increases in cognitive control during childhood are related to improvements in the representation and maintenance of goal information as children grow older, and that the physical structure of events we encounter in our environment affects the mode of cognitive control that we adopt. Finally, along with collaborators, my recent work in this area has resulted in the establishment of an effective, mobile measure of selective attention that can be used by future researchers to measure 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.