Project Directors:
Nora Newcombe
Nora S. Newcombe, Ph.D, is a Professor of Psychology at Temple University. Her research centers on cognition, development, spatial thinking, memory, and STEM education. Honors include the William James Fellow Award from APS and the George Miller Award and the G. Stanley Hall Awards from APA, the Award for Distinguished Service to Psychological Science, also from APA, and the Women in Cognitive Science Mentor Award. She is a fellow of four divisions of the American Psychological Association (General, Experimental, Developmental, and Psychology of Women), of the American Psychological Society, of the Cognitive Science Society, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
To learn more about Dr. Newcombe’s Research, click here!
Ingrid Olson
Ingrid Olson, Ph.D, is a Professor of Psychology at Temple University. In addition to her role as primary investigator for the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Ingrid is the director of the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Program at Temple. Her research focuses on human memory in both normal and impaired populations. She is particularly interested in social memory (memory for other people and their traits) and how these representations are instantiated in the brain in a large interactive network. Ingrid is also interested in the intersection of memory and decision making, and memory and language. In her research, she uses an assortment of techniques (fMRI, DTI, TMS, tDCS, eye-tracking) to address these questions.
To learn about Dr. Olson’s Research, click here!
Post-Doctoral Fellows:
Samantha Cohen
Sam is a cognitive neuroscientist interested in child development, narrative understanding, and memory. She is currently a postdoc at Temple University working with Nora Newcombe and Ingrid Olson on characterizing childhood memory.* Prior to joining Temple, Sam was a postdoc at Columbia University where she worked with Christopher Baldassano and Nim Tottenham on characterizing how brain responses to stories change with child development. She received her PhD in 2018 at the CUNY Graduate Center where she was mentored by Lucas Parra. Her dissertation focused on how a neural measure of engagement is predictive of attention, memory, and educational outcomes.
Graduate Students:
Kim Nguyen
Kim is a graduate student in the Cognition and Neuroscience department and is mentored by Dr. Nora Newcombe and Dr. Ingrid Olson. She received her B.S. in Neurobiology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. She is interested in the development and decline of episodic and spatial memory and using fMRI methods to link function with behavior.
Naoya Tani
Naoya is a graduate student in the Developmental Psychology area and is mentored by Drs. Nora Newcombe and Ingrid Olson. He received his B.S. in Human Development and B.A. in Psychology, with a minor in Education, from University of California, Davis, in 2017. He is interested in episodic memory development with using both the behavioral and neuroimaging approach, such as fMRI.
Research Assistants:
Jacob Lader
Jacob graduated with a B.S. in Neuroscience and Studio art from Muhlenberg College. His undergraduate research included over two years in Dr. Matthieu de Wit’s cognitive neuroscience lab as well as prior college-funded independent research in cognitive psychology. He is interested in visuospatial cognition.
Kate Hill
Kate graduated with a B.A. in Psychology and a minor in cognitive neuroscience from Temple University in 2022. During undergrad, she worked under Dr. Peter Marshall in the Developmental Science Lab, completing independent research within the lab, related to neural representations of fingers. She is interested in cognition, specifically when memory begins to fail.
Josh Litwin
Josh graduated with a B.A. in Cognitive Neuroscience and a minor in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. His undergrad research included working under Dr. Allyson Mackey at the Changing Brain Lab, as well as several other behavioral labs with focuses on Decision-Making and Morality. He is interested in studying the relationship between aging and memory, in the context of both early development and neurodegeneration.