There is a new doctor in the house!! Congratulations to Felicia Chaisson for beautifully defending her dissertation titled "Stress on the brain: An investigation into the impact of stress on learning, memory, and metamemory processes". After graduation, Felicia will begin a postdoctoral research position at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
Dr. Lucas recently travelled to Texas A&M University to attend the 2024 meeting of the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Southwest Regional Conference, aka ARMADILLO!
Check out our latest paper, "The impact of threat of shock on memory for threat-irrelevant information: Evidence for a role of reduced semantic organization", which is now out in the journal Biological Psychology! Led by graduate student Felicia Chaisson, we provide evidence that acute anxiety can not only reduce the amount of information that is encoded into memory but it can also alter the way that memories are organized. Specifically, we demonstrate that information encoded in a state of heightened anxiety has less semantic structure or organization than information encoded in a non-anxious state, and that reduced semantic-organizational processing can mediate the relation between the physiological effects of anxiety (e.g., increase skin conductance) and reduced subsequent memory for information encoded in an anxious state.
Super congrats to Bri Cairney for successfully defending her dissertation titled "Optimizing associative memory in autistic and non-autistic adults: Retrieval practice post-retrieval feedback, and gesture". A beautiful body of work and only the beginning for Bri!
Alena Knieper presents at Discover Day
BAM Lab graduate students Felicia Chaisson, Bri Cairney, and Chloe Kindell presented their research at the 2024 meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in Toronto!
Graduate student Bri Cairney is taking an exciting next step in her career! She has accepted a position as a Hilibrand Postdoctoral Fellowship in Autism Research at Yale University, to begin in the summer of 2024. Congratulations on this very well-deserved opportunity! The BAM Lab will miss you but we look forward to hearing about your new adventures as a postdoc!
SfN Baton Rouge Chapter is official!
Congratulations to Felicia Chaisson for an extremely successful general exam defense! This is a major milestone in our program and an impressive accomplishment. Welcome to ABD status, Felicia!
Check out our latest paper, "Interpretations of meaningful and ambiguous hand gestures in autistic and non-autistic adults: A norming study", lead by BAM lab graduate student Bri Cairney.
Congratulations to Chloe Kindell for completing and defending her MA thesis, "Tracking encoding dynamics via multi-state modeling of eye movements". Stay tuned for more updates on this exciting new line of research using hidden Markov models to understand how eye movements shape memory organization!
Dr. Lucas recently visited Texas State University to attend the 2023 meeting of the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Southwest Regional Conference, aka ARMADILLO!
This month, BAM Lab graduate students Chloe Kindell and Bri Cairney will be presenting their research at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research! Stop by their posters to hear about cutting-edge work on eye movements, co-speech gesture, and memory formation!
Dr. Heather Lucas and Dr. Melissa Beck were recently awarded a four-year NSF grant!! They will use EEG and eye tracking to investigate the neural and cognitive basis of spatial cognition and its amenability to training!
Congratulations to our 2023 BAM Lab graduates, Z Rigamer and Adrienne Wyble! Wishing you all the best in your exciting next chapters.
Congratulations to BAM Lab RA Z on her successful defense of their honors thesis, "Where do we focus? Self-regulated learning strategies in encoding unfamiliar faces"!
Congratulations to Bri Cairney, who passed her general examination with flying colors! This is a major milestone in our program and a great accomplishment. Welcome to ABD status, Bri!
Keep an eye out for our upcoming paper title "Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for the flexible recruitment of feature- and object-based processing in visual working memory comparison", which has been accepted for publication in the journal Biological Psychology! This was a wonderful collaboration with the Beck Visual Cognition Lab!
Keep an eye out for our new paper titled "Dynamic interactions between memory and viewing behaviors: Insights from dyadic modeling of eye movements", which was recently accepted for publication in JEP:HPP!
Congratulations to Chloe Kindell on her first conference presentation of graduate school! She gave an excellent poster presentation on how divided attention affects memory-related eye movements.
Congratulations to Bri for giving an excellent talk about her research at the International Max Plank Research School for Language Sciences!
Congratulations to our most recent BAM Lab graduates, Z Rigamer and Adrienne Wyble! Wishing you all the best in your exciting next chapters.
BAM Lab RA Adrienne Wyble presented her research on how participants' confidence levels impact the effectiveness of feedback during retrieval practice at the 2022 meeting of LSU Discover Day
Semantic processing during encoding impacts memory, but what impacts semantic processing during encoding? Stop by posters C108 and C109 at CNS 2022 for some exciting ERP work on the (negative) effects on acute stress and the (sometimes positive) effects of gesture! We are so excited to finally be able to share some of our research in person in San Francisco!
Check out BAM Lab graduate and McNair Scholar Amber Alford's poster, "An investigation of the effects of acute stress on elaborative encoding strategies", at the 2022 virtual meeting of the Society for Affective Science.
Dr. Lucas will be presenting some of the BAM Lab's work on eye movements and memory encoding at the 2021 virtual Psychonomics meeting! Her talk will be during the 'Recognition Memory 1' session on Saturday, November 6. Hope to see you there!
BAM Lab graduate student Felicia Chaisson will present her event-related potential research about anxiety and memory at the upcoming virtual meeting of the Society of Psychophysiological Research! We hope to see you there!
We are so excited to welcome a new graduate student to the BAM Lab team! Chloe received her Bachelor's in Psychology from Florida Southern College and will be joining us in the fall of 2021!
If you are attending the virtual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society this year, make sure you check out Bri's poster, "Interpretations of meaningful and ambiguous gestures in individuals with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder"!
BAM Lab graduate student Brianna Cairney has been accepted to attend the 2021 ERP Boot Camp in San Diego, CA! Congratulations Bri!
BAM Lab graduate students Brianna Cairney and Felicia Chaisson will be giving talks at the upcoming meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association, which is coming up from March 17-20! Felicia will be presenting data on how anxiety influences memory for threat-irrelevant information, and Bri will be debuting a soon-to-be-public gesture database! We hope to see you there!
Amber Alford, LSU McNair Scholar and BAM Lab research assistant, has been awarded an LSU Discover Grant to pursue an independent research project on the effects of acute stress on memory. We look forward to working with her to carry out this exciting project. Congratulations Amber!
BAM Lab graduate student Brianna Cairney was awarded this year's Graduate Student Research Award at the (virtual) 2020 meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association Conference! Her presentation, entitled "Iconic gestures enhance mental imagery and facilitate associative memory formation", was selected from a pool of more than 150 submissions from across all areas of Psychology. Congratulations Bri!!
Heather Lucas, PI of the BAM Lab, has received a 3-year RcS grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents! This grant will fund the lab's work on age-related changes to visual exploration and its relationship to episodic memory.
Congratulations to graduating senior BAM Lab research assistants Cristen Cooper, Cody Capps, and Stan West! We will miss you all very much and wish you the best as you take the next step in your careers.
I am pleased to announce that BAM Lab graduate student Felicia Chaisson has been awarded a prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! This fellowship provides her with three years of independent funding for her graduate studies. Congratulations Felicia!
Check our our latest paper about how age-related changes to language processing can interacti with associative memory: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00339/full This paper is part of a special issue on neurocognitive interactions between memory and language, edited by Melissa Duff and Vitoria Piai: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/9151/language-and-memory-understanding-their-interactions-interdependencies-and-shared-mechanisms
BAM Lab Research Assistant Stan West was accepted into LSU's ASPIRE program for the 2019-2020 academic year! This award comes with a travel grant to allow him to present his research at the next annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Congratulations Stan!!
Rebecca Wallace, BAM Lab Researcher Assistant and senior Psychology major, successfully defended her Undergraduate Honors Thesis, "The Effects of Threat-Evoked Anxiety on Visuospatial Memory Encoding"! Her accomplishment will be recognized at the Honors College graduation in May. Congratulations, Rebecca!!
BAM Lab graduate student Brianna Cairney was awarded an Honorable Mention for her application to the 2019 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship program! Congratulations Bri!
What can research on memory systems teach us about implicit social bias? We delve into this question in our latest paper, which is now online in the journal Neuroscience.
Our latest paper, The Hippocampus Promotes Saccadic Information-Seeking, is now out in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience!