“Academia and the World Beyond: Navigating Life after a PhD” is out! If you’ve ever been asked “What will you do after?” and been unsure what to say, this book is for you!

Dr. Madan interviewed 22 people with PhDs in both academic and non-academic careers. What did they study, what do they do now, how did they transition, what advice do they have for current PhD students. Also great for supervisors in knowing more about the options and current job market.

New paper out in Cognition, led by Alice Mason.

“In three pre-registered experiments, we presented people with risky options, where the outcomes were drawn from continuous ranges (e.g., 100–190 or 500–590), and then assessed their memories for the outcomes experienced. […] people were very poor at recalling the exact outcomes encountered, but rather confabulated outcomes that were consistent with the outcomes they had seen and were biased towards the more extreme ranges encountered.”

Dr. Madan was recently on a podcast, discussing findings on emotional memory and memory strategies.

The new edition of the Oxford Handbook of Human Memory is coming out soon!

It spans an impressive array of 82 chapters, including one on “Conditioning and Associative Learning” in collaboration with Alice Mason and Elliot Ludvig.

Two new papers published recently, based on analyses of the HCP Young Adults dataset.

The first was led by Ian McDonough and focused on differences in brain function and structure related to dementia risk: “Young adults with a parent with dementia show early abnormalities in brain activity and brain volume in the hippocampus: A matched case-control study”.

The second was led by Carly McIntyre-Wood and James MacKillop, examining individual differences in delay discounting in relation to brain structure: “Neuroanatomical foundations of delayed reward discounting decision making II: Evaluation of sulcal morphology and fractal dimensionality”.

The third article in an on-going series in the Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions is now out.

“Interleaving is an evidence-based, learning-science strategy that is relevant to the planning and implementation of continuing professional development (CPD). Mixing related but different areas of study forces the brain to reconcile the relationship between the areas while understanding each area well.”

Dr. Madan is now collaborating on Project NeuroSync, lead by Sobana Wijeakumar.

“Project NeuroSync is a newly funded research project in the Infant and Toddler Lab in the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham. It is run by a multi-disciplinary team of psychology researchers and neuroscientists interested in child development. In this project, we are interested in how babies respond to, learn to interact with and eventually, ‘fall into sync’ with their mothers. To this end, we will use experimental games, brain scanning equipment, head-mounted cameras and questionnaires to understand how babies ‘fall into sync’ with their mothers.”

Dr. Madan is now the Publicity Officer for the British Association of Cognitive Neuroscience (BACN)!

The next annual meeting will be held at the University of Birmingham, 24-25 May 2022.

New paper, providing advice on preparing for a PhD thesis and viva, now out in Cognitive Psychology Bulletin!

“Research involves iteratively learning to use certain academic skills with increased proficiency, such as searching the literature, conducting statistical analyses, and clearly communicating ideas in scientific writing. However, the ultimate expression of these skills is only carried out once—the PhD thesis and viva. […] Here I outline four particularly beneficial resources that current PhD students can read to clarify their expectations and enhance their preparations.”

New paper out, in collaboration with Dr. Daniela Palombo and students in her lab.

“The present study investigated the influence of emotion (positive and negative) on detail generation in autobiographical memory across two retention intervals; recent (≲3 months old) and remote (~1–5 years old). We found that the number of perceptual details recalled did not differ for emotional versus neutral autobiographical memories in either time period. By contrast, emotion exerted effects on autobiographical memory for other types of details—a pattern that differed depending on both the age and valence of the memories. We discuss these findings in turn.”

Dr. Madan has been quoted in a Nature article highlighting a recent survey of PhD supervisors.

Several presentations!

Talk:
(285) Making Memories that Matter: Considering Motivated and Strategic Memory Processes - Madan

Poster:
(1207) Predicting Trial-and-Error Learning from the Feedback-Related Negativity - Chakravarty
(1209) Fractionating the Reward-Memory Literature - Simonsen
(1440) The Effect of Aging and Mnemonics on Name Recall - Gopi
(2393) Impact of Performing a Secondary Task on Recall and Recall Dynamics - Zhang