Contact Information
Email
Lab Website
(615) 343-5242
221 Kirkland Hall
Research Area
Education
University of Kansas, BGS, 1979
Yale University, MS, 1981
Yale University, MPhil, 1982
Yale University, Ph.D., 1984
Curriculum Vitae
Current Courses
Psychology 099: Stumbling into, and out of, happiness
Advising
Timothy McNamara
Vice Provost for Faculty and International Affairs
Professor of Psychology
McNamara's research investigates human memory. One line of research investigates how spatial relations among objects in the environment are represented in memory, and how remembered spatial relations are used to guide navigation. A second line of research uses priming paradigms (e.g., semantic priming, priming in item recognition) to examine mechanisms of retrieval in semantic and episodic memory.
Representative Publications
- McNamara, T. P. (2005) Semantic priming: Perspectives from memory and word recognition. New York: Psychology Press. (200 pp).
- Kelly, J. W., McNamara, T. P., Bodenheimer, B., Carr, T. H., & Rieser, J. J. (2008). The shape of human navigation: How environmental geometry is used in the maintenance of spatial orientation. Cognition, 109, 281-286.
- Kelly, J. W., McNamara, T. P., Bodenheimer, B., Carr, T. H., & Rieser, J. J. (2009). Individual differences in using geometric and featural cues to maintain spatial orientation: Cue quantity and cue ambiguity are more important than cue type. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 176-181.
- Mou, W., Liu, X., & McNamara, T. P. (2009). Layout geometry in encoding and retrieval of spatial memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 35, 83-93.
- Mou, W., Zhang, H., & McNamara, T. P. (2009). Novel-view scene recognition relies on identifying spatial reference directions. Cognition, 111, 175-186.