Cathy Robinson
Education & Employment History
Yes, there is life before psychology. I earned a B.A. degree in television production from California State University, Northridge. For several years, I was an advertising executive, first as part-owner of a Spokane, Washington advertising agency, and later I served as director of advertising for a book publisher. You know those dust jackets on books that you carelessly toss aside because they're in the way? Well, I wrote the sales copy for those - the fluffy sales pitch that lured you into purchasing the book to begin with. In the midst of writing copy and advertising this and that, I woke up one day and decided to join the millions of other Americans who make major career changes. And voila, I decided to become a psychologist.
Upon changing careers, I knew almost immediately that my new psychology love would be cognition. I took every undergraduate psychology class under the sun while enrolled as a post-baccalaureate student at California State University, Bakersfield, and then at University of North Carolina, Asheville. While at UNCA, I had the privilege of working in Dr. Tracy Brown's cognition lab conducting attentional research with the Stroop task. After doing research there for two years, I was hooked, so I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology. Now I'm a 3rd-year graduate student in Dr. Christine Chiarello's Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory.
Research Focus
While pursuing my Ph.D. in psychology at UCR, I recently earned my M.A. My master's experiment was called "Hemispheric Asymmetries in False Recognition for Strong and Weak Word Lists." Now that's a mouthful, but what it boils down to is an interest in investigating how semantic memory activation has consequences for episodic memory. Specifically, I combined the priming research that shows cerebral asymmetries in word recognition under certain conditions (e.g., Chiarello et al., 1990) with the Deese (1959), Roediger & McDermott (1995) false-memory paradigm (DRM).
For my experiment, I created 36 strongly-associated and 36 weakly-associated DRM study lists from the Nelson, McEvoy, & Schreiber (1998) word association norms, then set about to examine the various conditions under which the activation strength of preexisting knowledge influences a person's memory for new information through memory errors. In the DRM task, the preexisting information is a novel, unpresented word (critical). Participants study a list of 15 words that are all associated to that critical word. During a later recognition test, there is a high probability that people will falsely recognize the unstudied critical word. Of particular interest to me, is how the left and right hemispheres process the memory errors differently, and how the strength of the relationship between the critical word and its studied associates can modulate hemispheric performance. My results were interesting, and I found false memory in both hemispheres. The strong DRM lists resulted in more false recognition in the left hemisphere than the right. Enticingly, the weak lists resulted in a trend toward more false recognition in the right hemisphere than the left. As I continue into my next phase of research, I intend to follow up on this experiment and further examine the hemispheric asymmetries in false memory.
E-mail & Office
catrob@citrus.ucr.edu
Lab: 909.787.4307