Dr Dominic Guitard

Overview

Research Summary

When shopping for ingredients for a recipe, it is essential to pick up each ingredient without being too distracted by thinking about the order in which the ingredients will be assembled; whereas when all ingredients are laid out on the kitchen counter, there are strong cues indicating the ingredients and attention should be shifted primarily to the order in which these ingredients are to be used. This simple example highlights the two fundamental traits of memory, item information (which ingredients to buy in the example) and order information (order of the ingredient in the example).

Item and order information are omnipresent in our life and essential for performing our daily activities (e.g., taking our medications). Beyond the important practical implications, how we can remember items in presented order, is one of the oldest unanswered questions of experimental psychology.

In my research, I am conducting experimental and computational examinations to better understand that question. More exactly, I investigate how people can learn, maintain, and remember information in order and which factors affect item and order information (e.g., attention, semantic, emotion, lexical, sub-lexical, recall direction, irrelevant information, dual-task).

I am particularly interested in the problem of attention allocation, memory, language, prior knowledge, and knowledge representations. My theoretical goal is to develop a coherent account of memory, attention, learning, and language. My applied goal is to inform the development of educational practices and cognitive technologies.