Renee Biss
3d year PhD Candidate
Department of Psychology
University of Toronto
100 St. George Street
Room 600
Toronto, ON M5S 3G3
renee.biss(at)utoronto.ca
I am a third year PhD student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, supervised by Dr. Lynn Hasher.
My current work in the Hasher Aging and Cognition lab focuses on two different research questions. One line of research focuses on the way that positive emotional states influence what we attend to in the environment and how we remember information. For my M.A. thesis, we found that younger adults in a positive mood pick up more distracting information from the environment and are able to use this information on future tasks. This is one example of younger adults in positive moods tending to process information in a similar way to older adults. Since older adults generally report being much happier than their younger counterparts, some of our current research focuses on how older adults’ more positive affective states may contribute to what are normally regarded as cognitive aging effects.
Our other line of research explores ways to apply older adults’ difficulties with ignoring irrelevant information to actually benefit memory. More specifically, we are interested in whether presentations of distraction can help older adults to remember important information that they have already encoded, perhaps with practical application in both healthy older adults and clinical populations.
I completed a B.A. in Psychology at McGill University in 2007. During my studies at McGill, I worked with Dr. Andy Baker on a project investigating human causal reasoning, and with Dr. Lesley Fellows of the Montreal Neurological Institute, studying the association between clinical and experimental measures of prefrontal cortex function in patients with brain damage.
Please feel free to email me if you have any questions about my research.
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