Mackenzie Bain (mbain29@uwo.ca)

I am a PhD psychology candidate in the Cognitive, Developmental, and Behavioural Sciences (CDBS) stream at the University of Western Ontario. I am co-supervised by Dr. Ken McRae and Dr. Stefan Köhler. In 2022, I received my Masters of Science in Psychology (CDBS) at Western. My MSc thesis focused on how cues initiate spontaneous simulations of future and past events. This work has been accepted in the Journal of Memory and Cognition and is currently in-press.

My PhD dissertation focuses on characterizing people's understanding of activity centrality (importance) in event knowledge. During the occurrence of any particular event, certain activities will be more important than other activities. For example, during the event eating at a restaurant, the activity order food is more important than is make a reservation. Order food is a more central activity because it is a key activity that almost always occurs when eating at a restaurant whereas make a reservation is a less central activity because it is not always necessary for successful completion of that event, and might only occur during a small proportion of particular visits to a restaurant (e.g., for a special event). 

Although many event cognition theories discuss centrality, few studies have characterized how people think about and understand centrality in event knowledge. To provide further insight into activity centrality, my dissertation takes a network science approach to understand how people think about centrality in event knowledge. Part of my dissertation work has been published in the Proceedings of Cognitive Science Journal. My list of publications can be viewed in the appropriate tab.

In cognitive psychology, I am broadly interested in event cognition and event knowledge, episodic future thinking, and autobiographical memory.