Principle Researcher

Miri Besken

Miri Besken is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Bilkent University. Prior to completing her Ph.D in Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she obtained her B.S. in Psychology from Middle East Technical University and an M.A. in Developmental Psychology from Koç University. Before coming to Bilkent University, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Heinrich Heine Universität in Düsseldorf, Germany. Her research interests lie in the intersection of memory, learning and metacognitive processes with a focus on healthy young adults.

Phone: +90 (312) 290 17 28

E-mail: mbesken@bilkent.edu.tr

 

Graduate Students

Öykü Aydın

Öykü received her B.S. and M.A. in Psychology from Çankaya University. She is currently a third-year Ph.D. student in Psychology at Bilkent University. Her research primarily centers on the implications of encoding strategies in long-term memory. She is continuing her doctoral studies under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Miri Besken. Broadly, she is working on how the cognitive offloading phenomenon applies to long-term memory. Her current project explores how photo-taking and note-taking strategies affect memory and metamemory processes, as well as underlying cognitive mechanisms.

E-mail: oyku.aydin@bilkent.edu.tr

Bengi Kamar

Bengi graduated with a B.S. in Psychology from Izmir University of Economics in 2024. She is currently an M.A. student in Psychology at Bilkent University, continuing her studies under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Miri Besken. Her research interest is value-directed remembering (VDR) paradigm.

E-mail: bengi.kamar@bilkent.edu.tr

 

Halil Dönmez

Halil obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Ege University and recently began his Master’s studies in Psychology at Bilkent University under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Miri Besken. His recent research interest has been the interaction between emotions and memory performance, with a particular focus on disgust. However, he now plans to focus on broader memory concepts.

E-mail: halil.donmez@bilkent.edu.tr

 

Undergraduate Students

Ayşenur Baş

Ayşenur is a 4th-year undergraduate student in the Psychology Department of Bilkent University. She is currently working on her senior project under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Miri Besken, focusing on cognitive offloading with AI tools and the effects of search fluency on metacognitive judgments. Her main areas of interest encompass learning and educational psychology.

 

Ayşin Aytatlı

Ayşin is a senior Psychology student with a minor in Communication and Design. She is currently working on a project investigating Value-Directed Remembering and has previously focused on Working Memory Efficiency during her internship at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. Alongside her academic work, she is also active at Radio Bilkent, where she hosts the psychology program “Çift Kişilik”.

 

Dilara Alpertürk

Dilara is a 3rd-year undergraduate student at the Bilkent University Department of Psychology. She is particularly interested in the mechanisms of metamemory and learning, and aims to pursue research in these areas.

 

Eftelya Ekin Tomak 

Eftelya is a 4th-year undergraduate student in the Psychology Department of Bilkent University. She is currently working on her senior project under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Miri Besken, focusing on the underlying mechanisms of the illusory truth effect. Her main interest lays on the subjectivity of memory and the maleability of cogntive judgements.

Melissa Altınkaya

Melissa is a 4th-year undergraduate student in the Psychology Department of Bilkent University. She is currently working on her senior project under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Miri Besken on the Effects of Perceptual Fluency on False Memory. Her research focuses on memory processes, with particular interest in false memory and metamemory.

Alumni

  • Nilsu Atılgan (Assistant Professor at Bilkent University)
  • Meltem Karaca (Postdoctoral Researcher at Boston University)
  • Belgin Ünal (Ph.D. student at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
  • Derya Karademir (Ph.D. student at Boğaziçi University)
  • Ecem Eylül Ardıç (Ph.D. student at WUSTL)
  • Elif Hilal Kurt (Ph.D. student at Sabancı University)
  • Ezgi Melisa Yüksel (Ph.D. student at UW-Madison)
  • Fatih Yavuz (Ph.D. student at METU)
  • Gizem Filiz (Ph.D. student at WUSTL)
  • Samet Kaya (Ph.D. student at UNC)
  • Esra Elibüyük Okumuş (Former MA student at Memory Lab)
  • Elif Cemre Solmaz (Former MA student at Memory Lab)
  • Gamze Nur Eroğlu (Former MA student at Memory Lab)
  • Rengin Dalkıran (Former MA student at Memory Lab)
  • Aşkın Su Aşkınol (M.Sc. student at Maastricht University)
  • Berru Benan Orhan (M.A. student at KU Leuven)
  • Ceren Bal (M.Sc. student at University of Amsterdam)
  • Deren Ateş (MA student at Koç University)
  • Ezgi Özgan (M.A. student at Bilkent University)
  • İpek Şahin (M.A. student at Sabancı University)
  • Meryem Gökçe Yavuz (M.A. student at Boğaziçi University)
  • Nilsu Sağlam (M.Sc. student at University of Tübingen)
  • Sencer Topcu (M.Sc. student in Barcelona)
  • Ezgi Ersen Ceylan (Senior UX Researcher at Insider)
  • Duygu Uraş (Former undergraduate student at Memory Lab)
  • Şevval Yörük (Former undergraduate student at Memory Lab)