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
Memory consolidation over a delay in early childhood
This project explored the effects of overlapping vs. unique content tested both immediately and after a 24-hour delay in children ages 4 and 6 years old. We found that, although overlapping content proved more challenging for children in both age groups, and both groups of children performed worse after a delay, there was a protective effect of the delay against interference in 4-year-olds, suggesting young children whose memory abilities are still developing may benefit from a consolidation window for overlapping information to avoid memory interference.
Generalization vs. specificity in children's & adults' memory
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's vs. adults' 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.
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, doing yoga, 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!
