Every day we make choices. These choices can range from the mundane such as choosing what we want to eat for breakfast, or what kind of jeans we want to buy. However, we also make choices that have long-lasting implications for our lives such as which graduate school to attend or what industry we want to work in.

The guiding question of my research is how people use memory-based strategies to make the various choices that make up our lives.

Imagination and choice:

Pairing rich imaginations of the future has been shown to promote more patient choices. We are studying the mechanisms of these strategies using fMRI and representative samples across the adult lifespan to characterize how the adoption of these strategies change with age and whether these changes are associated with structural and functional brain networks.

Imagination and self-efficacy:

We have recently found a relationship between a self-report measure of vividness of visual imagery (VVIQ) and a self report measure of self-efficacy (GSES). We are currently working on followup studies to apply these findings to career decision making contexts.

Memory-based strategies and aging:

We often face situations where we must consider multiple attributes in a decision. How do we prioritize which information upon which to base our decisions? Using a novel paradigm, we have studied how people weigh different attributes when making immediate choices and when they have to make choices after holding these attributes in memory. We are currently investigating how the strategies that people use to remember multiple attributes for choice change with age.