August 2025

Welcome to the official Department of Psychology newsletter!

Welcome

Welcome back to school! As we start a new academic year, we wish you all a successful and fulfilling journey ahead. May this year be filled with new opportunities, exciting challenges, and memorable experiences. Here’s to a year of growth, learning, and achievement!

Welcome Fall 2025 Graduate Students

Isabella Jackson

Clinical

Mentor: Ashley Watts

Yulan Chen

Clinical

Mentor: Antonia Kaczkurkin

Shucheng Li

CCN

Mentor: Tom Palmeri

Jessica Szu-Chi Cheng

Clinical

Mentor: Bunmi Olatunji

Congratulations

Jordan Gunn

Jordan passed his PhD dissertation defense, under the direction of Sean Polyn, PhD, on August 19th, 2025. Congratulations, Dr. Gunn! His thesis, “Same Item, Distinct Contexts: Episode-Specific Reinstatement in Free and Serial Recall” makes substantial contributions to our understanding of human memory. This work examines (among other things) how repeated experiences are stored in memory: Do the different experiences blend together, or are they stored in distinct memory traces? Jordan developed novel computational models and analysis techniques to demonstrate that in many cases, repeated experiences seem to be stored separately, which contrasts with the predictions of dominant models of human memory search. More...

"Tipsy Teachings" with Dr. Gauthier

Dr. Isabel Gauthier gave a public interest lecture in the "Tipsy Teachings" lecture series at the Blue Room in Nashville. The lecture was titled "Why Some People See What Others Miss".

After 20 years… Rankin has left the building!

Rankin McGugin came to Vanderbilt in 2006 to work with Isabel Gauthier, after writing her college thesis on Isabel’s work. In 2011, Rankin defended her dissertation and began a post-doctorate research fellowship in the Gauthier Lab. During this time, she was a member of the National Scholars Honor Society and won several awards, including the Learning Sciences Institute Topper Award, the Lisa M. Quesenberry Foundation Fund Award and the Pat Burns Memorial graduate student research award. In 2016, Rankin became a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology. She served as a mentor to dozens of Vanderbilt students through the Undergraduate Neuroscience Program and the School for Science Math at Vanderbilt, and was a member of the Kennedy Center (and Kennedy Center Lecture Committee). She has published 14 first-author peer-reviewed papers and co-authored another dozen, with work represented in journals such as PNAS, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Cerebral Cortex, Affective Behavioral Neuroscience, Neuropsychologia, Trends Cognitive Science, and others. Rankin is moving to Miami with her family for the year, but will not be a stranger to Wilson Hall.

Sean Polyn and Geoff Woodman publish in Psychological Review

Sean Polyn and Geoff Woodman’s novel computational theory of visual working memory was recently accepted for publication into Psychological Review! Their paper “Capacity not required: A long-term memory model that exhibits key signatures of working memory” demonstrates that the same contextual targeting mechanism used to explain performance in long-term memory tasks like free recall can also explain performance limitations in visual working memory tasks usually taken as evidence for a capacity-limited short-term memory system.

Upcoming Talks

Clinical: Tuesday's, 12:00-1:00pm, 316 Wilson Hall

September 2 -- Ali Sloan

September 9 -- Lindsey C. McKernan, PhD

September 16 -- Sarah Szymkowicz, PhD

September 23 -- Katherine Schafer, PhD

September 30 -- Meredith Gruhn, PhD

CCN: Thursday's, 12:10-1:00pm, 316 Wilson Hall

September 4 -- Matt Johnson

September 11 -- Geoff Woodman, PhD

September 18 -- Noah Fram

September 25 -- Jason Chow

Neuroscience: Friday's, 1:25-2:15pm, 316 Wilson Hall

August 29 -- Suzana Herculano- Houzel, PhD

September 5 -- Swarat Kulkarni

For More Information Click Here...

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