Alice F. Healy

Last updated
Alice F. Healy
Alma materVassar College; The Rockefeller University
OccupationProfessor Emeritus, University of Colorado Boulder

Alice Fenvessy Healy is a psychologist and College Professor of Distinction Emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder where she founded and directed the Center for Research on Training. She is known for her research in the field of cognitive psychology, spanning diverse topics including short-term memory, long-term memory, psycholinguistics, reading, decision-making, and cognitive training. [1]

Contents

Healy and her colleague Lyle E. Bourne, Jr. are authors of the book Train Your Mind for Peak Performance: A Science-Based Approach for Achieving Your Goals [2] and the textbook Cognitive Processes with Roger Dominowski and Elizabeth Loftus. [3] [4] Healy and Bourne co-edited several volumes together including Training Cognition: Optimizing Efficiency, Durability, and Generalizability, [5] Foreign Language Learning: Psycholinguistic Studies on Training and Retention, [6] and Learning and Memory of Knowledge and Skills: Durability and Specificity. [7] Healy co-edited, with Robert Proctor, the Handbook of Psychology, Volume 4 Experimental Psychology. [8] With Stephen Kosslyn and Richard Shiffrin, she co-edited a two-volume Festschrift in honor of her doctoral advisor, William Kaye Estes. [9]

Healy is a fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 1 and Division 3), the Association for Psychological Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society of Experimental Psychologists. She has served as President of Division 3 (Experimental Psychology) of the American Psychological Association, as Chair of the Psychology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and as Chair of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. She was recipient of the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award [10] and the Women in Cognitive Science Mentorship Award. Healy was honored by the Federation of Associations of the Behavioral and Brain Sciences as a scientist who "made important and lasting contributions to the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior" in 2014. [11] That year, her career was celebrated with a Festschrift, with participants contributing to a Special Issue of the American Journal of Psychology. [12]

Biography

Healy received her bachelor's degree in psychology (summa cum laude) at Vassar College in 1968. [13] She continued her education at The Rockefeller University where she completed her Ph.D. dissertation titled Short-term Memory for Temporal and Spatial Order Information in 1973, under the supervision of Estes. [1] Healy was a member of the faculty of the Department of Psychology at Yale University from 1973 to 1981. She moved to the Department of Psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1981, where was promoted to professor in 1984 and named College Professor of Distinction in 2007.

Healy married James Bruce Healy in 1970. [14] Together they have a daughter, Charlotte Healy.

Healy's research program has been supported by grants from agencies including the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the U. S. Air Force, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Research

Healy's research interests are diverse and span a wide range of topics in the field of cognitive psychology. Her research on cognitive training has examined conditions under which skills are learned, retained, and transferred, [15] and has drawn attention to the need for specificity in skill training. Participants tend to show benefits of training on subsequent tasks only when able to use the same cognitive operations acquired during the training.

Her work on psycholinguistics and reading has investigated the processing of word boundaries and sublexical units of words during reading. Healy observed that participants exhibited a greater number of letter detection errors when they were reading word sequences that were familiar or have contained function words, such as the and and. Her findings suggest that familiar word sequences are often read in chunks comprising units larger than a single letter. [16] [17]

In other research, Healy and her colleagues investigated the effect of temporal and spatial order of information on short-term memory. In a study of memory for lines of a school song, Overstreet and Healy observed primacy and recency effects when students were instructed to reorder the lines of the song. In an item selection task, participants were presented with lines from the song with a word omitted and were tasked with choosing the correct word (out of two options) to fill in the missing word. Overstreet and Healy observed a serial position effect in the reconstruction task, but not the item selection task, which suggested that the serial position effect was due to the retention of individual lines of the song, and not due the particular items within each line. [18]

Representative publications

Related Research Articles

Cognition Act or process of knowing

Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses many aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: attention, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and "computation", problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and generate new knowledge.

The concepts of fluid intelligence (gf) and crystallized intelligence (gc) were introduced in 1963 by the psychologist Raymond Cattell. According to Cattell's psychometrically-based theory, general intelligence (g) is subdivided into gf and gc. Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve novel reasoning problems and is correlated with a number of important skills such as comprehension, problem solving, and learning. Crystallized intelligence, on the other hand, involves the ability to deduce secondary relational abstractions by applying previously learned primary relational abstractions.

The testing effect is the finding that long-term memory is often increased when some of the learning period is devoted to retrieving the to-be-remembered information. The effect is also sometimes referred to as retrieval practice, practice testing, or test-enhanced learning. Retrieval practice may be the best way to refer to the testing effect because the benefits of retrieval-related testing are not limited to tests. It can be more broad, including tools like flash cards and quizzes. The testing effect on memory should be distinguished from more general practice effects, defined in the APA Dictionary of Psychology (2007) as "any change or improvement that results from practice or repetition of task items or activities." The term testing effect is also sometimes used in a more general sense; The Oxford Dictionary of Psychology (2003) defines a testing effect as "any effect of taking tests on the respondents, a typical example being test sophistication." Whereas psychologists who develop tests for personality and intelligence want to avoid practice effects, cognitive psychologists working with educators have begun to understand how to take advantage of tests—not as an assessment tool, but as a teaching/learning tool.

Psychonomic Society

The Psychonomic Society is one of the primary societies for general scientific experimental psychology in the United States. It is open to international researchers, and almost 40% of members are based outside of North America. Although open to all areas of experimental and cognitive psychology, its members typically study areas such as learning, memory, attention, motivation, perception, categorization, decision making, and psycholinguistics. Its name is taken from the word psychonomics, meaning "the science of the laws of the mind".

In psychology and neuroscience, memory span is the longest list of items that a person can repeat back in correct order immediately after presentation on 50% of all trials. Items may include words, numbers, or letters. The task is known as digit span when numbers are used. Memory span is a common measure of short-term memory. It is also a component of cognitive ability tests such as the WAIS. Backward memory span is a more challenging variation which involves recalling items in reverse order.

The generation effect is a phenomenon where information is better remembered if it is generated from one's own mind rather than simply read. Researchers have struggled to account for why generated information is better recalled than read information, but no single explanation has been sufficient.

Mind-wandering is the experience of thoughts not remaining on a single topic for a long period of time, particularly when people are engaged in an attention-demanding task.

Robert Allen Bjork is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on human learning and memory and on the implications of the science of learning for instruction and training. He is the creator of the directed forgetting paradigm.

In cognitive psychology, the missing letter effect refers to the finding that, when people are asked to consciously detect target letters while reading text, they miss more letters in frequent function words than in less frequent, content words. Understanding how, why and where this effect arises becomes useful in explaining the range of cognitive processes that are associated with reading text. The missing letter effect has also been referred to as the reverse word superiority effect, since it describes a phenomenon where letters in more frequent words fail to be identified, instead of letter identification benefitting from increased word frequency.

Judith F. Kroll is a Distinguished Professor of Language Science at University of California, Irvine. She specializes in psycholinguistics, focusing on second language acquisition and bilingual language processing. With Randi Martin and Suparna Rajaram, Kroll co-founded the organization Women in Cognitive Science in 2001. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Psychological Association (APA), the Psychonomic Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Association for Psychological Science (APS).

Nora Newcombe

Nora S. Newcombe is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and the James H. Glackin Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Temple University. She is a Canadian-American researcher in cognitive development, cognitive psychology and cognitive science, working on the development of spatial thinking and reasoning and on the development of episodic memory. She was the principal investigator of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center, one of six NSF-funded Science of Learning Centers.

Susan Goldin-Meadow

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Comparative Human Development, the college, and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. She is the principal investigator of a 10-year program project grant, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, designed to explore the impact of environmental and biological variation on language growth. She is also a co-PI of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation to explore learning in an interdisciplinary framework with an eye toward theory and application. She is the founding editor of Language Learning and Development, the official journal of the Society for Language Development. She was President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2007–2012.

Barbara Tversky is a professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University and a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Tversky specializes in cognitive psychology. She is an authority in the areas of visual-spatial reasoning and collaborative cognition. Tversky’s research interests include language and communication, comprehension of events and narratives, and the mapping and modeling of cognitive processes. She is the author of Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. Basic Books, 2019.

Some of the research that is conducted in the field of psychology is more "fundamental" than the research conducted in the applied psychological disciplines, and does not necessarily have a direct application. The subdisciplines within psychology that can be thought to reflect a basic-science orientation include biological psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and so on. Research in these subdisciplines is characterized by methodological rigor. The concern of psychology as a basic science is in understanding the laws and processes that underlie behavior, cognition, and emotion. Psychology as a basic science provides a foundation for applied psychology. Applied psychology, by contrast, involves the application of psychological principles and theories yielded up by the basic psychological sciences; these applications are aimed at overcoming problems or promoting well-being in areas such as mental and physical health and education.

In the study of learning and memory, varied practice refers to the use of a training schedule that includes frequent changes of task so that the performer is constantly confronting novel instantiations of the to-be-learned information.

Viorica Marian is a Moldovan-born American Psycholinguist, Cognitive Scientist, and Psychologist known for her research on bilingualism and multilingualism. She is the Ralph and Jean Sundin Endowed Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University. Marian is the Principal Investigator of the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group. She received her PhD in Psychology from Cornell University, and master's degrees from Emory University and from Cornell University. Marian studies language, cognition, the brain, and the consequences of knowing more than one language for linguistic, cognitive, and neural architectures.

The Society for Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science (SEPCS) is a scholarly organization of psychologists in the principal area of general experimental psychology. The goals of this society are to promote, advance, and increase inclusion and exchange of ideas among the scholars in the many subfields of experimental psychology, both in basic and applied research. The society focuses on supporting research through advocacy, training and education, public policy, and outreach. It engages in a wide variety of service work, including leadership in the American Psychological Association's governance.

Paul Bertelson (1926–2008), was an internationally recognized experimental cognitive psychologist.

The Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences is a Washington, D.C.-based coalition of learned societies dedicated to psychology and related behavioral sciences. Its official journal is Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which is published by SAGE Publications.

Debra Titone is a cognitive psychologist known for her research on bilingualism and multilingualism. She is currently a Professor of Psychology and a chair holder of Canada Research in Language & Multilingualism at McGill University. Titone is a founding member and officer of the professional society, Women in Cognitive Science. She and her colleagues have written about gender disparities in opportunities, along with the advancement of women the field of cognitive science, with specific reference to Canada.

References

  1. 1 2 "Alice Healy". www.colorado.edu/psych-neuro/.
  2. ↑ Bourne, Lyle Eugene (2014). Train your mind for peak performance : a science-based approach for achieving your goals. Healy, Alice F. (First ed.). Washington, D.C. ISBN   978-1433816178. OCLC   851285582.
  3. ↑ Bourne, Lyle (1986). Cognitive processes. Dominowski, Roger, Loftus, Elizabeth, Healy, Alice F. (2nd ed.). London: Prentice Hall International. ISBN   978-0131398412. OCLC   16472666.
  4. ↑ Maclean, Allan (1987-01-01). "Cognitive processes (2nd edn), Lyle Bourne, Roger Dominowski, Elizabeth Loftus and Alice Healy, Prentice-Hall International, Englewood Cliffs N.J., 1986. No. of pages: 374. Price: £12.95 (Paperback). ISBN 0 13 139841 501". Applied Cognitive Psychology. 1 (1): 73–74. doi:10.1002/acp.2350010111. ISSN   1099-0720.
  5. ↑ Training cognition : optimizing efficiency, durability, and generalizability. Healy, Alice F., Bourne, Lyle Eugene, 1932-. New York, NY: Psychology Press. 2012. ISBN   978-1848729506. OCLC   769185525.CS1 maint: others (link)
  6. ↑ Foreign language learning: psycholinguistic studies on training and retention. Healy, Alice F., Bourne, Lyle Eugene, 1932-. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates. 1998. ISBN   978-0805827545. OCLC   39261804.CS1 maint: others (link)
  7. ↑ Learning and memory of knowledge and skills : durability and specificity. Healy, Alice F., Bourne, Lyle Eugene, 1932-. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications. 1995. ISBN   978-0803957589. OCLC   609992168.CS1 maint: others (link)
  8. ↑ Experimental psychology. Healy, Alice F., Proctor, Robert W., Weiner, Irving B. (2nd ed.). Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons. 2013. ISBN   978-0470649930. OCLC   820862032.CS1 maint: others (link)
  9. ↑ Essays in honor of William K. Estes. Estes, William K. (William Kaye), Healy, Alice F., Kosslyn, Stephen Michael, 1948-, Shiffrin, Richard M. Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates. 1992. ISBN   978-0805810974. OCLC   25007493.CS1 maint: others (link)
  10. ↑ "The James McKeen Cattell Fund Fellowship Recipients". www.cattell.duke.edu.
  11. ↑ "Alice F. Healy, PhD – FABBS". fabbs.org. Retrieved 2017-12-05.
  12. ↑ "Special Issue: Alice Healy Festschrift". The American Journal of Psychology. 128 (2). Summer 2015. JSTOR   10.5406/amerjpsyc.128.2.issue-2.
  13. ↑ "In Honor Of…Alice F. Healy". FABBS.
  14. ↑ "Alice Fenvessy and J. B. Healy Wed". The New York Times. 1970-05-10. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2017-12-05.
  15. ↑ Bonk, William J.; Healy, Alice F. (2010). "Learning and Memory for Sequences of Pictures, Words, and Spatial Locations: An Exploration of Serial Position Effects". The American Journal of Psychology. 123 (2): 137–68. doi:10.5406/amerjpsyc.123.2.0137. PMID   20518432.
  16. ↑ Drewnowski, A.; Healy, A. (1977). "Detection errors on the and and: Evidence for reading units larger than the word". Memory and Cognition. 5 (6): 636–647. doi: 10.3758/BF03197410 . PMID   24203280.
  17. ↑ Healy, Alice F.; Drewnowski, Adam (1983). "Investigating the boundaries of reading units: Letter detection in misspelled words". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 9 (3): 413–426. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.9.3.413. PMID   6223980.
  18. ↑ Overstreet, Michael F.; Healy, Alice F. (16 November 2010). "Item and order information in semantic memory: students' retention of the "CU fight song" lyrics". Memory & Cognition. 39 (2): 251–259. doi: 10.3758/s13421-010-0018-3 . PMID   21264623.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.