Embedded Files
Welcome to the McRae Cognitive Science Lab, headed by Ken McRae. Our lab is part of the Department of Psychology and Centre for Brain & Mind at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, Canada.
Susie MacRae will be presenting a poster at CNS highlighting her newest study investigating contributions of manipulability from semantic knowledge, and during the learning episode (abstract link).
In previous work, we have found an enactment boost when learning associations between objects and locations. We have also found that participants remembered manipulable stimuli (tools) more accurately than non-manipulable stimuli (animals). In the current research, we investigate whether enactment effects persist even when the retrieval task does not involve movements similar to those during learning. We replicated previous effects showing a memory advantage for active learning and for manipulable items. This suggest that motor information (through enactment and stimulus differences) improves memory for object-location associations even if the action is not reinstated during test.
LAB NEWS
At CNS, Mackenzie Bain will be presenting their dissertation research: Using network science to provide insight into people’s understanding of activity centrality
To characterize how people might think about activity centrality, we used multiple measures of network centrality to predict participants’ rankings of centrality on five measures. We found that CheiRank, which assigns importance to activities that lead to many other important activities, was the strongest predictor of participants’ centrality rankings for all five centrality measures. We also found that Closeness centrality, which assigns importance to activities that are on many short paths throughout the event network, was also a consistent and significant predictor for all five measures. These results suggest that people consider activities to be central when other important activities depend on them.
Google Sites
Report abuse