My research

I conduct research in several areas, however, a common theme through much of my work is how context influences judgments across a wide variety of psychological processes. Whether perceptual context (i.e., perceptual information surrounding a stimulus) developmental context (i.e., family ethnicity), social context (i.e., the culture or historical period in which an individual's life is embedded) or environmental context (i.e., the weather outside, the amount of time someone spends in natural or built environments), my work investigates how context can be easily overlooked, yet fundamentally influences psychological processes. You can read more about my work at my lab's web site.

Some recent examples of my research:

ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
With Michelle Verges, I am investigating the implicit connections people have with natural or built environments, and how contextual factors such as weather or season influence this connection.Based on some fascinating work by Wesley Schultz and his colleagues in California, we are trying to understand the role of nature in our lives using an Implicit Association Test. We have found that people feel connected with nature when the weather is nice (i.e., spring) but feel disconnected from nature when the weather outside is frightful (i.e., winter). We also explore how valence and typicality influence connection with nature. For instance, people may feel connected to natural objects such as birds or trees that don't harm us, but not so to natural objects like tornadoes or snakes that can kill or eat us. The goal of this research is to better understand how people reason about the natural world so that we can improve the way people treat nature. 

We also completed a very interesting project on public recycling compliance. The idea behind this research is that built environments can be ergonomically designed to be smarter. If one wants to improve recycling compliance in public settings, providing recycling bins with little holes on the lid increases recycling compliance by 33% over recycling bins without little holes on the lids.

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
With Stella Lourenco, I am studying how infants perceive the context surrounding an object using a visual habituation task. The goal of this research is to understand spatial reasoning in infants to better understand how infants develop into adults who know how to navigate through their environments. But we need infants, so if you have a 4 - 8 month old baby and would like to contribute 15 minutes to science, please visit my lab's web site to see a movie about how we study infant visual perception. It's fun and involves a stuffed animal monkey dancing on a stage!) I also study cultural differences in children's books. This is a fun project about how Asian children books foster an interdependent mode of being a person, while North American books foster an independent mode of being a person. I am currently in the process of exploring these questions with Japanese and Korean collaborators.

SOCIO-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY
With Shinobu Kitayama and Etsuko Hoshino-Brown, I am studying cultural differences in self and development. Currently I am exploring how three ethnic groups that settled in New Jersey - Irish, Italians, and Puerto Ricans - exhibit similarities and differences in the way they think about themselves, their families, their society, and their culture. I have long been interested in the cognitive aspects of immigration and colonialism, which is a topic that cuts across many disciplines (i.e., literature). I'm also collaborating with Etsuko on a project about cognitive dissonance. (I joke with Etsuko - "I'm really glad I decided to work with you over the other people I could have chosen to work with when I decided to work with you!" You kinda have to be a psychologist to get that punchline.)

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
With Beth Crawford and David Falcone (my old mentor and true guitar hero), I conduct research on how the order that we experience members of a new category influences how we represent that category. For instance, imagine you travel to Zimbabwe and met a few Zimbabweans at the beginning of your trip. At the end of your trip, you meet a few more Zimbabweans. Will your memory for Zimbabweans be more influenced by the initial people or the most recent people you met? Our research suggests that the initial ones receive greater weight in your category representation, in part because they initially establish the category, and once established, categories are 'sticky.' We found analogous results using spatial categories.

OLDER IDEAS
My older research has to do with the development of spatial reasoning, a Bayesian model of estimation, and Japanese/North American cultural differences in attention. I still conduct research on these topics but I figured you'd be more excited about the recent studies. If you're interested in some of the older stuff, you can read the original research reports on my main page. Feel free to contact me if you have any question about my research!

GET INVOLVED IN RESEARCH! IT'S FUN!!!

People sometimes say that research is boring, but usually these are people who have never tried it and who are content to simply believe whatever anyone tells them.  Why not ignore these fools and find out for yourself? Believe me - the world is a far more interesting place when you find things out for yourself (instead of wasting time listening to people who say research is boring!)

I am always more than willing to work with student collaborators in my lab. If you have any interest, feel free to contact me and we can discuss some options. My email is seduffy@camden.rutgers.edu.