Susan Benear, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University
Photo by HONEY Photo + Video
I am a cognitive neuroscientist who studies learning and memory from a developmental perspective. I am currently a postdoc working with Dr. Catherine Hartley at New York University. I earned my B.A. in Psychology from Penn State University and my Ph.D. in Psychology from Temple University, where I was jointly mentored by Drs. Nora Newcombe and Ingrid Olson.
My research focuses on memory and reinforcement learning across development, which I examine using behavioral and neuroimaging techniques (fMRI), as well as computational modeling. I am interested in how children perceive and remember complex events, how children's memory systems prioritize generalization vs. specificity depending on contextual features, and how children and teens use memory to guide their decisions.
Selected Projects
Semantic similarity predicts generalization in adults and children, but episodic specificity does so only in adults
In this study we examined whether there was a contingency between the ability to generalize and the ability to recall specific details of an episode, and if this differed by age. We found 4-8-year-old children and adults both used item-level details and semantic similarity between members of a learned category to help them generalize, but only adults used bound item-context information to support generalization. This suggests that until children have the ability to recall robust episodic memories, they rely on other knowledge to support generalization.
Children and adults show both similarites and divergences in their neural & behavioral event cognition
For this project we investigated how 4-7-year-old children understand and remember events by having them segment a TV show into events and answer memory questions. We found that children segmented events more like adults with increasing age, and children who segmented more like adults had better memory. We also found that children's brains showed evidence of event boundaries in the hippocampus and angular gyrus, and that children's boundaries sometimes matched adults' boundaries, but sometimes did not.
Free recall of complex events improves dramatically in early childhood and lags recognition memory
This study was a follow-up to our previous research on event cognition, aiming to examine children's ability to freely, verbally recall complex events, such as a television episode. We found that, even in children whose event memory was quite robust according to probed measures, their free recall performance was well below that of adults. Free recall detail was often at floor for children below age 5.5 years. Verbal ability was a strong predictor of free recall, suggesting development of both mnemonic and linguistic capabilities contributes to free recall ability.
About Me
I grew up in Oklahoma and Texas, where I spent my formative years taking piano and voice lessons and was on my high school's dance team. I earned my undergrad degree from Penn State, where I double majored in psych and PR, was a Pi Phi, and worked on two journalistic publications. I lived in Nashville for two years after I graduated, the first teaching 7th grade English with Teach for America, and the second as a lab manager in a higher-level vision lab at Vanderbilt. The next year, I moved to Philly to start grad school at Temple studying episodic memory development. After earning my Ph.D., I moved to New York for my postdoc to focus on computational modeling of reinforcement learning across development.
My interests outside of science include cooking and baking, running, playing piano, reading novels, and eating and drinking at my favorite spots around the city with my partner and friends. I have many plants and two cats named Kahlua and Fizz!
