People

Priti Shah is the Psychology Department Chair and is a Professor in Psychology, Information, and Education. She is also a Faculty Associate in the Research Center for Group Dynamics of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. She received her BA from the University of North Carolina and her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 1996. She directs the Basic and Applied Cognition Laboratory. Her research focuses on higher level cognition (thinking, reasoning, problem solving), the basic cognitive mechanisms supporting these abilities (executive functions, attention), and educational application. She has edited 3 volumes and published over 70 articles and chapters. Her work has been funded by the Institute for Educational Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Naval Research, the Spencer Foundation, and the James S. McDonnell Foundation. She is an Associate Editor at Memory & Cognition and has served on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Educational Psychology and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. She has received awards for her research, mentoring, and teaching. Priti cares deeply about the intersection high quality educational science and values and thus she founded this website and invited cognitive science experts, teachers, and others to share their knowledge and insights.

Dr. Audrey Michal is a cognitive psychologist with experience studying topics related to cognitive neuroscience, data visualization, and scientific reasoning. In her current line of research she investigates the best way to teach middle and high school students scientific reasoning skills. Check out Audrey’s personal website here!

Dr. Madison Fansher completed her undergraduate education at Purdue University and graduate training at University of Michigan. She is broadly interested in topics related to complex cognition and is especially interested in developing interventions to improve reasoning and decision-making. In her work she also examines individual differences in willingness to exert cognitive effort. 

Jahla Osborne is a third year PhD student in the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience program. Her current research examines individual differences in ADHD as it relates to internal and external distraction. She is especially interested in studying the phenomenon Hyperfocus within ADHD as well.

Atakan Atamer is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience program. In his recent research, he investigates whether experiencing processing difficulty promotes analytical reasoning.  His primary interest lies in topics related to reasoning, judgment and decision-making, and mental effort.

Madelyn Quirk is a second year PhD student in the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience area of the Psychology department. Her research focuses on the varying mechanisms of attention by studying internal and external distraction and the cognitive and motivational processes of ADHD. Through collaboration with the BAAC, she is able to explore these interests within different educational and scientific contexts as well.

Sarah Mia Liberatore is a lab manager for three Cognitive labs in the Psychology department. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2023, where she studied Psychology and Biology. Their research interests include clinical diagnostic paradigms, particularly as they pertain to neurodivergent and queer individuals, and they are excited to see what a cognitive approach can teach us about processing and decision making. Sarah can often be found bird watching, dancing, or staring at colorful spreadsheets.

Grace DesJardins is an undergraduate student majoring in Cognitive Science and minoring in Applied Statistics and Computer Science. She is particularly interested in how cognitive psychology relates to computers and data. In the BAAC Lab, she mainly helps with the Scientific Reasoning projects. She is looking forward to learning more research skills in the BAAC Lab to help with her future endeavors. Her honors thesis examines interventions to teach people about cumulative risk.