Derek Isaacowitz, professor of psychological and brain sciences, has been named the 2025 recipient of the Mid-Career Trajectory in Affective Science Award. He will receive the honor at the Society for Affective Science’s annual conference in Portland, Oregon, in March.
At his February installation ceremony, the chair of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences and professor of radiology presented his lab’s recent work and discussed how people’s memories perform better when they break longer events into shorter pieces, known as segmentation. The way our brains process and organize information can tell us a lot about human development, he said, especially when it is affected by diseases. “I’m in this line of work because I’m captivated by the bare, bald facts of human experience,” Zacks said.
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have created a neural network model to understand the mechanics of how humans concentrate in complex environments. With this task, participants face three distractions from a primary task, mimicking more natural conditions for human concentration. Instead of looking at simple colored words (Stroop task), participants are required to find a target feature among complex stimuli with varying shapes, colors, borders and motion directions. People respond slower when the target is mixed with many distractors. (Image courtesy of Control and Decision Making lab)
Ageism is “prevalent, invisible and hurts older people and communities,” said Nancy Morrow-Howell, the Bettie Bofinger Brown Distinguished Professor of Social Policy at the Brown School, who leads the study with center co-director Brian Carpenter, a professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences.
A transdisciplinary team funded by TRIADS discovered an unexpected behavioral pattern when they asked humans to train an AI bot.
A survey by researchers in The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences found that children were more likely to report major discrimination if their parents had experienced something similar.
Researchers in The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences are using cutting-edge techniques to help us weather the challenges of everyday life.
Trying to find a needle in a haystack? A new study by researchers in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences suggests a little distraction could be a good thing.
A multi-institutional research project led by Todd Braver, a professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, received a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) award from the U.S. Department of Defense to study attention control and strategies to improve it.