University of Calgary

Faculty Member, Psychology

Professor of Psychology

About

I have been a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary since 1995. I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in human cognition, psycholinguistics, research methods, statistics, and evolution and behavior. I am a core faculty member in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) graduate program and I supervise BCS students, but I also supervise students in the Clinical Psychology program who wish to train as researchers and have strong interests in attention and memory research.

At the most general level, my research explores human cognition and information processing, including attention, memory, and language comprehension. We use a variety of data collection methods in my lab, including speeded choice tasks, masked priming tasks, and eye movement tracking and recording.

Some of our recent studies have examined cognitive distortions and information processing biases associated with dysphoria and depression. We are interested in the effects of depressed mood on the interpretation of ambiguity (e.g., Bisson & Sears, 2007; Sears, Bisson, & Nielsen, 2010), and on memory and attention (e.g., Sears, Thomas, LeHuquet, & Johnson, 2010). One focus of our work in the future will be to explore the attentional biases of individuals vulnerable to depression (e.g., Sears, Newman, Ference, & Thomas, 2011). A major focus of our current research is to determine how experimentally induced moods affect selective attention and memory for emotional information (Newman & Sears, 2011).

My other research interests are in psycholinguistics, especially visual word identification and reading. Most of my studies in this area focus on the processing of orthographic, phonological, and semantic information in adult readers of varying skill levels (e.g., Sears, Siakaluk, Chow, & Buchanan, 2008), including bilinguals (e.g., Nakayama, Sears, Hino, & Lupker, 2011). Orthographic neighborhood effects, and their implications for computational models of word identification, have been a continuous interest for many years (e.g., Sears, Hino, & Lupker, 1995; Nakayama, Sears, & Lupker, 2010).

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