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Welcome to the Memory Lab at the Department of Psychology at Bilkent University. Our lab focuses on human memory and metacognitive processes. We are using behavioral methods in our lab, in computerized settings. More information about our ongoing projects is available on the Research page.
For any of your questions, you can contact us through e-mail.
General Research Interests
Our research interests lie at the intersection of learning and memory. People process countless stimuli every day and remember only an incomplete and imperfect version of this information. The limited contents of people’s minds determine who they are, how they define themselves, the way that they tell their life stories, which new information they will attend to, and what decisions they will make. In order to examine what and how they remember, we pursue several interrelated research projects that focus on the topics below:
Metamemory: Beliefs, heuristics, and control processes in memory
An important factor in memory encoding is the set of beliefs that people have about their memory. These beliefs, heuristics, and control processes guide memory encoding and are referred to as metamemory. Metamemory is important because it determines how we will allocate our limited resources in the face of incoming information. Recently, it has been suggested that certain perceptual and conceptual characteristics of the material may induce illusions that participants will remember some information better than others, despite the fact that memory performance is unrelated to these illusions. One line of research in our lab examines the systematic factors that lead to these illusions.
Encoding factors in memory
People use different cues in order to choose how they will guide their limited resources to encode incoming information. One of the cues that they frequently use is the novelty of the incoming information. If something is in conflict with their general world knowledge, they often encode the information more extensively than typical information that they confront more routinely. One line of research examines the importance of novel and unusual information in learning and encoding information.