Bauer Memory at Emory Lab

Meet the members of our lab!

Dr. Patricia Bauer
Principal Investigator
patricia.bauer@emory.edu

The primary work of our laboratory is the study of memory and how it develops from infancy onward. Many of our studies focus on developments in episodic and autobiographical memory. By late in the first to early in the second year of life, infants accurately recall specific events over delays of weeks and even months. Many factors that affect memory in older children and adults also influence infants’ memories. These findings demonstrate continuity in recall processes across a wide developmental span. Yet there also are pronounced developmental changes in memory over the first years of life and beyond. By combining behavioral and electrophysiological (ERP) measures, my colleagues and I are working to understand how the functional changes we observe relate to developments in the basis processes of encoding, consolidation, storage, and retrieval of information from memory; and to neuro-developmental changes that take place in the same period of time. The work has yielded novel insights into changes in personal episodic or autobiographical memory that help to explain childhood amnesia—the relative paucity of memories of specific events and experiences that happened early in life. Our findings indicate that the amnesia can be explained by faster rates of forgetting in childhood relative to adulthood, resulting in a smaller corpus of memories that subsequently are available for recollection. Many other of our studies focus on the development of semantic memory—the storehouse of world knowledge that we build up over time through our experiences in formal educational settings and everyday life. We are especially interested in how children and adults combine or integrate separate yet related episodes of new learning and extend beyond it to actually self-generate new factual knowledge. We pursue these questions in the laboratory and in the classroom, using behavioral methods as well as eye-tracking and ERPs to shed light on the cognitive processes involved in this important means of accumulation of knowledge.

 Hilary Miller, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
hilary.e.miller@emory.edu

Hilary has been a postdoctoral researcher since June 2018. She completed her doctoral dissertation in psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation focused on the role that language and visual attention play in the development of children’s spatial skills. She is particularly interested in understanding how children and adults acquire STEM-related skills and knowledge. To investigate these issues, she uses multiple methodologies including eye-tracking, textual analysis, coding of children’s speech and gesture and coding of parent interactions. In the Bauer lab she is working on projects related to how children implicitly integrate and self-derive new knowledge, how the content of story books and parent-child interaction around story books facilitates children’s learning, and how undergraduate students learn from diagrams in STEM courses.

Jessica Dugan
Doctoral Candidate 
jessica.dugan@emory.edu

Jessica graduated from the Honors College at the College of Charleston in 2014 with a Bachelor of Science in psychology and a focus in behavioral neuroscience. She joined the Bauer lab in the fall of 2014. Broadly speaking, she is interested in the development of semantic memory in both humans and nonhuman primates. She is particularly fascinated by generative processes that allow for extension of knowledge and the role that metacognition plays in these processes. She studies these processes in school-aged children and adults using both behavioral and eye-tracking techniques. As a Mechanisms of Learning NRSA Fellow, she collaborates with Dr. Rob Hampton, and through this collaboration she is extending her work on self-generation and metacognition to rhesus monkeys using computerized cognitive testing.

Ana Maria Hoffmann
Doctoral Student

ana.maria.hoffmann@emory.edu

Ana Maria Hoffmann graduated from the University of San Francisco in 2016 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a minor in Neuroscience. She began her graduate career at Emory in 2017. Ana Maria’s research interests include the development of semantic memory in humans, particularly the factors that influence. In addition, she is interested in the effect that multilingualism plays in the building a semantic-knowledge base in children and adults.

Julia Wilson
Doctoral Student
julia.taylor.wilson@emory.edu

Julia Wilson graduated from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, in 2018 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a concentration in Neuroscience. She joined the Bauer lab as a first year graduate student in August 2018. Julia’s research interests include the neurocognitive basis and development of knowledge extension throughout childhood and adulthood. In particular, she is interested in using neurophysiological and behavioral methods to study self-derivation of new knowledge in children.

Lucy Cronin-Golomb
Doctoral Student
lucy.miranda.cronin-golomb@emory.edu

Lucy has been a lab coordinator in the Bauer Lab since August 2017. She graduated in 2017 from Tufts University with degrees in Biopsychology and English. As an undergraduate, she worked in the Gabrieli Lab at MIT on several studies aimed at understanding the brain basis of reading and language, specifically on how to predict reading difficulty in young children. In the Bauer Lab, she is currently working on studies that explore various aspects of self-derivation through memory integration in children and adults.

Demet Kara
Doctoral Student

Demet joined the Bauer lab as a visiting student researcher with a Fulbright Ph.D. Dissertation Research Grant in September 2019. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in psychology from Bilkent University, and Master of Arts degree in developmental psychology from Koc University. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Middle East Technical University with a focus on developmental psychology. She is mainly interested in understanding the effect of gender in autobiographical memory. For her dissertation, she examines young adults’ memories about their siblings to identify the gender and culture based differences in autobiographical memory characteristics and narrative identities.

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