Jessica Payne | |
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Alma mater | University of San Diego, B.A. Mount Holyoke College, M.A. University of Arizona, Ph.D |
Occupation | Associate Professor of Psychology at University of Notre Dame |
Jessica D. Payne is a psychologist and associate professor at the University of Notre Dame. Payne's research focuses on the impact of sleep and stress on human memory and psychological well-being. [1] Payne won the Early Career Award from the Psychonomic Society in 2015. [2] Previously, she received the Laird Cermak Award for early contribution to memory research by the International Neuropsychological Society in 2010. [3] Payne has contributed her expertise on sleep to media outlets including New York Times, CNN, and Huffington Post. [4] [5]
Payne completed her B.A. degree in psychology (summa cum laude) in 1995 at the University of San Diego. She went to graduate school at Mount Holyoke College, where she obtained her M.A. in experimental psychology in 1999. She continued her education, receiving a PhD in psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Arizona in 2005, where she worked under the supervision of Lynn Nadel and focused on the effects of stress on memory. [6] [7] Payne completed two postdoctoral fellowships (2005-2009), the first at the Harvard Medical School, where she worked under the supervision of Robert Stickgold, and the second at Harvard University, where she worked with Daniel Schacter and Robert Stickgold. [8] [9]
Payne joined Department of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame in 2009, where she is the Nancy O'Neill Collegiate Chair in Psychology and Director of the Sleep, Stress, and Memory Lab. She serves on the neuroscience advisory board of the NeuroLeadership Institute [10] and is Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology; General. [11]
Payne's research focuses on how sleep and stress impact cognition, memory, and psychological functioning. [12] Several of her studies have examined memories of emotional events experienced under conditions of stress or sleep deprivation, which may be subject to distortion or false memory, due to the release of stress hormones. [6] [7] [13] When someone is sleep deprived and under stress, frontal lobe circuits may be compromised and the amygdala may become hyperactive, resulting in elevated levels of cortisol which impacts memory consolidation. [14] [15]
Payne and her colleagues have explored how memory may be enhanced when individuals sleep shortly after encoding new information. [16] In one of their studies using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, [8] volunteers learned a list of related words that they had to recall after a 12-hour delay. Half learned the list at 9 a.m. and were tested at 9 p.m. whereas the other half learned the list at 9 p.m. and were tested the following day at 9 a.m. after a night's sleep. Participants who had slept performed better at recalling the list than those who stayed awake. At the same time, those who slept were also more likely to experience false memories, i.e., they recalled words that were related in meaning to the items on the list but were not actually present. Such findings suggest that a creative synthesis of information may occur during sleep.
In other work, Payne and her colleagues examined the effect of sleep on relational memory defined as the "flexible ability to generalize across existing stores of information." [17] Participants learned pairs of premises with an embedded hierarchy and were tested on their ability to draw logical inferences based on the premises. Participants who slept prior to testing were better able to draw the inferences than participants who did not sleep, even though all groups showed accurate retention of the information contained in the premises. [17] Payne's research provides support for the view that unique properties of sleep are directly involved in declarative memory consolidation. [18] She suggests that incorporating a 20-minute nap each day would be beneficial for psychological and physical health, as it helps the brain to encode incoming information and may lead to higher levels of creativity. [5] [19] [20] Payne notes that it is important to limit naps to 20 minutes to avoid the risk of falling into a deep sleep and waking amidst slow-wave sleep. Naps are an effective way to compensate for sleep debt, i.e., the cumulative effect of not getting enough sleep. As alternative strategies to enhance brain activity. Payne suggests engaging in five-minute meditation exercises, engaging in diaphragmatic breathing, taking walks, and changing one's environmental surroundings. [14] [21]
Long-term memory (LTM) is the stage of the Atkinson–Shiffrin memory model in which informative knowledge is held indefinitely. It is defined in contrast to short-term and working memory, which persist for only about 18 to 30 seconds. Long-term memory is commonly labelled as explicit memory (declarative), as well as episodic memory, semantic memory, autobiographical memory, and implicit memory.
Multiple hypotheses explain the possible connections between sleep and learning in humans. Research indicates that sleep does more than allow the brain to rest; it may also aid the consolidation of long-term memories.
Endel Tulving is an Estonian-born Canadian experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. In his research on human memory he proposed the distinction between semantic and episodic memory. Tulving is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. He joined the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences in 1992 as the first Anne and Max Tanenbaum Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and remained there until his retirement in 2010. In 2006, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian honour.
Explicit memory is one of the two main types of long-term human memory, the other of which is implicit memory. Explicit memory is the conscious, intentional recollection of factual information, previous experiences, and concepts. This type of memory is dependent upon three processes: acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval. Explicit memory can be divided into two categories: episodic memory, which stores specific personal experiences, and semantic memory, which stores factual information. Explicit memory requires gradual learning, with multiple presentations of a stimulus and response.
Sleep spindles are bursts of neural oscillatory activity that are generated by interplay of the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) and other thalamic nuclei during stage 2 NREM sleep in a frequency range of ~11 to 16 Hz with a duration of 0.5 seconds or greater. After generation as an interaction of the TRN neurons and thalamocortical cells, spindles are sustained and relayed to the cortex by thalamo-thalamic and thalamo-cortical feedback loops regulated by both GABAergic and NMDA-receptor mediated glutamatergic neurotransmission. Sleep spindles have been reported for all tested mammalian species. Considering animals in which sleep-spindles were studied extensively, they appear to have a conserved main frequency of roughly 9-16 Hz. Only in humans, rats and dogs is a difference in the intrinsic frequency of frontal and posterior spindles confirmed, however.
Affective neuroscience is the study of how the brain processes emotions. This field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood. The basis of emotions and what emotions are remains an issue of debate within the field of affective neuroscience.
Susan A. Clancy is a cognitive psychologist and Associate professor in Consumer behaviour at INCAE as well as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University. She is best known for her controversial work on repressed and recovered memories in her books Abducted and The Trauma Myth.
Coherence therapy is a system of psychotherapy based in the theory that symptoms of mood, thought and behavior are produced coherently according to the person's current mental models of reality, most of which are implicit and unconscious. It was founded by Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley in the 1990s. It has been considered among the most well respected postmodern/constructivist therapies.
Memory and trauma is the deleterious effects that physical or psychological trauma has on memory.
Emotional self-regulation or emotion regulation is the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with the range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed. It can also be defined as extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions. Emotional self-regulation belongs to the broader set of emotion regulation processes, which includes both the regulation of one's own feelings and the regulation of other people's feelings.
Selective retention, in relating to the mind, is the process whereby people more accurately remember messages that are closer to their interests, values and beliefs, than those that are in contrast with their values and beliefs, selecting what to keep in the memory, narrowing the information flow.
Negative affectivity (NA), or negative affect, is a personality variable that involves the experience of negative emotions and poor self-concept. Negative affectivity subsumes a variety of negative emotions, including anger, contempt, disgust, guilt, fear, and nervousness. Low negative affectivity is characterized by frequent states of calmness and serenity, along with states of confidence, activeness, and great enthusiasm.
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, and expert on the development of spatial thinking and reasoning and episodic memory. She was the principal investigator of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (2006-2018), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation.
Memory consolidation is a category of processes that stabilize a memory trace after its initial acquisition. A memory trace is a change in the nervous system caused by memorizing something. Consolidation is distinguished into two specific processes. The first, synaptic consolidation, which is thought to correspond to late-phase long-term potentiation, occurs on a small scale in the synaptic connections and neural circuits within the first few hours after learning. The second process is systems consolidation, occurring on a much larger scale in the brain, rendering hippocampus-dependent memories independent of the hippocampus over a period of weeks to years. Recently, a third process has become the focus of research, reconsolidation, in which previously consolidated memories can be made labile again through reactivation of the memory trace.
Emotion can have a powerful effect on humans and animals. Numerous studies have shown that the most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events, which are likely to be recalled more often and with more clarity and detail than neutral events.
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, it would be impossible for language, relationships, or personal identity to develop. Memory loss is usually described as forgetfulness or amnesia.
The self-reference effect is a tendency for people to encode information differently depending on whether they are implicated in the information. When people are asked to remember information when it is related in some way to themselves, the recall rate can be improved.
Elizabeth Kensinger is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Boston College. She is known for her research on emotion and memory over the human lifespan. She is the author of the book Emotional Memory Across the Adult Lifespan, which describes the selectivity of memory, i.e., how events infused with personal significance and emotion are much more memorable than nonemotional events. This book provides an overview of research on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the formation and retrieval of emotional memories. Kensinger is co-author of a second book How Does Emotion Affect Attention and Memory? Attentional Capture, Tunnel Memory, and the Implications for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder with Katherine Mickley Steinmetz, which highlights the roles of emotion in determining what people pay attention to and later remember.
Kathleen McDermott is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. She is known for her research on how human memory is encoded and retrieved, with a specific interest in how false memories develop. In collaboration with Henry L. (Roddy) Roediger III, she developed the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm used to study the phenomenon of memory illusions. McDermott received the 2004-2005 F.J. McGuigan Young Investigator Prize for research on memory from the American Psychological Foundation and the American Psychological Association's Science Directorate. She was recognized by the Association for Psychological Science as a Rising Star in 2007. McDermott is a Fellow of the Psychonomic Society and was honored with a 2019 Psychonomic Society Mid-Career Award.
Suparna Rajaram, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Stony Brook University, is an Indian-born cognitive psychologist and expert on memory and amnesia. Rajaram served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society (2008) and as president of the Association for Psychological Science (2017-2018). Along with Judith Kroll and Randi Martin, Rajaram co-founded the organization Women in Cognitive Science in 2001, with the aim of improving the visibility of contributions of women to cognitive science. In 2019, she was an inaugural recipient of Psychonomic Society's Clifford T. Morgan Distinguished Leadership Award for significant contributions and sustained leadership in the discipline of cognitive psychology.