Social Cognition Laboratory

Psychology Department, University of Alabama

Director:	Jamie DeCoster, PhD
Office:	192 Gordon Palmer Hall
Phone:	(205) 348-4431
email:	jamie@ua.edu

Quick links:

Undergraduate RA Website	Experimental Materials	Ontology of Psychological Experiments
Methodology Grant	Implicit Cognitive Therapy	Interactivity Reading Group

Welcome to our lab website! If you are interested in understanding how our mental processes affect the way we think and interact with other people, then you've come to the right place. Social cognition represents a crossover between social psychology, the study of how we as individuals are affected by those around us, and cognitive psychology, the study of how we learn, process, and remember information. Some popular topics in social cognition are:

Person memory - how we store and remember information about people we meet.
Impression formation - how we form a general opinion about a person based on specific things we learn about them.
Persuasion - how information that we receive from others can change our attitudes.
Stereotyping and prejudice - how our expectiations about social groups influence the way we think and feel about group members.
Attribution - how we decide to explain who is responsible for the outcome of an event.

Our lab is concerned with psychological phenomena all throughout these domains, but we currently have ongoing research projects investigating:

Connectionist and dual-process models of person memory. We are trying to build computer models that learn and remember things in ways that parallel human cognition. Our goal is not to build a "perfect" memory, but rather to make one that processes information about people in a way that parallels human memory so that we can use the computer model to predict human reactions.
The effect of trait priming on impressions. We investigate how exposure to trait information in one context (priming) affects the impressions we form of people in entirely different context. Research shows that primes can have independent conscious and nonconscious effects on our impressions.
The effect of category priming on our attitudes. Recent research has demonstrated that thinking about members of a social category can cause people to think and behave like those in the category. We are currently examining how exposure to a category prime can effect not only the attitudes we have now, but our beliefs about attitudes we had when we were younger.
The effect of motivation and capacity on the perception of prejudice. Many times people will disagree as to whether a particular behavior was an instance of prejudice or not. We are trying to determine if these differences might be due in part to the different types of information used by people in different roles and with different levels of motivation and capacity to make accurate judgments.
The role of insight in problem solving. Many times we must come up with a new way of using a tool, or a new way to combine a set of tools together, in order to solve a particular problem. We are performing studies to see what things influence peoples' abilities to come up with these insights, like their training history, their familiarity with the tools, and the time pressure in the situation.
The differences between implicit and explicit learning. Some times people explicitly intend to learn new information. Other times they just "come to know" something implicitly without ever intentionally trying to learn anything. We are interested in seeing how the information we obtain through explicit learning relates to the information we get through implicit learning.
The way people explore and learn about new environments. When people are placed in a new situation they must discover the rules that govern that situation so that they may best choose their behaviors to maximize their goals. However, there are many factors that can cause people to limit their explorations or their ability to learn the rules that govern the situation. We are interested in determining how feelings of frustration and helplessness can affect peoples' ability to learn in new environments, especially those where the rules are too complex to be learned in an explicit fashion.
Studying cognition using interactive measures. We are beginning to explore how we can measure abilities or performance by observing how people manipulate and interact with their environment. Often times problems are not solved directly, but instead people try to change the nature of the situation to make solving a problem easier. We are trying to come up with ways to include this type of interaction in our studies by developing ways of measuring psychological constructs in a more interactive fashion. To this end we hold an Interactivity Reading Group that meets once a week to discuss how interactivity can be introduced to psychological research.
Detecting deception. We are conducting studies to determine whether a dual-process model might explain how people perform at detecting lies. Much of the past research shows that the more careful and thoughtful people are the worse they are at detecting deception. We believe this is because detecting deception is primarily an automatic process, and so will be most successful when conscious processing plays a small role in the judgment.

Are you interested in doing research on any these topics? We have opportunites for others to become involved in our lab at many different levels.

Faculty or current graduate students who wish to collaborate on topics in social psychology should contact Dr. DeCoster directly, either by email (jamie@ua.edu), phone (205-348-4431), or in person (192 Gordon Palmer Hall).
Current undergraduates who are interested in doing graduate work with Dr. DeCoster should check out the description of the UA Graduate Program in Cognitive Psychology.
Undergraduates at UA can earn course credit by helping out in our lab! Those interested should fill out the Undergraduate Research Assistant Application Form and return it to the Psychology main office (348 Gordon Palmer Hall). The work schedule for current undergraduate research assisitants can be found on the Undergraduate RA Website.

Current Lab Members

Graduate Students
Joe Chandler, MA Aimee Edison, PhD Jamie O'Mally, BA

Undergraduate RAs	Honors Thesis Advisees
Amanda Bridges (lab coordinator) (since Fall 2005) Tara Duffie (since Fall 2007) Shane Hand (since Fall 2007) Jody Thompson (since Fall 2007) John Velez (since Fall 2006)

Former Lab Members

Undergraduate RAs

Honors Thesis Advisees

Emily Patty (Fall 2007)
Folashade' Ayanwale (Spring 2007)
Phillip Jordan (Fall 2006 - Spring 2007)
Sherneria Warren (Fall 2005 - Spring 2007)
Matt Duggan (Fall 2006)
Charity Owens (Spring 2006-Fall 2006)
Ashley Dumas (Spring 2006)
Catherine Garland (Fall 2005 - Spring 2006)
Jennifer Plemons (Fall 2005)
Jason Goss (Spring 2005)
Elizabeth Hammonds (Fall 2004 - Spring 2005)
*Lakeshia Hardy (Spring 2005 - Spring 2006)
*Alison Hoffman (Spring 2004 - Spring 2005)
Christina Hobson (Fall 2004)
Crystal Murry (Fall 2004)

Sadie Cole (defended Spring 2006)
Brinkley Clanton (defended Spring 2007)

* Indicates a former lab coordinator