Erica Wohldmann, Ph.D.
Contact
- Assistant Professor
California State Univeristy, Northridge
Department of Psychology
erica.wohldmann@csun.edu
Education
- (2006) Joint Ph.D. in Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Colorado, Boulder
- (2004) M.A. Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder
Specialty Areas: Cognitive Psychology
Courses Taught
- PSY 150 Principles of Human Behavior
- PSY 403/L
Selected Publications and Presentations
Wohldmann, E. L., Healy, A. F., & Bourne, L. E. Jr. (in press). A mental practice superiority effect: Less retroactive interference and more transfer than physical practice. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
Carmien, S. & Wohldmann, E. L. (2008). Mapping images to objects by young adults with cognitive disabilities. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 29, 149-157.
Wohldmann, E. L., Healy, A. F., & Bourne, L. E., Jr. Physical but not mental practice yields retroactive interference. Paper to be presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Long Beach, CA, November 17, 2007.
Wohldmann, E. L., Healy, A. F., & Bourne, L. E. Jr. (2007). Pushing the limits of imagination: Motor imagery for learning sequences and skill. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 254-261.
Healy, A. F., Wohldmann, E. L., Sutton, E. M., & Bourne, L. E., Jr. (2006). Specificity effects in training and transfer of speeded responses. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32, 534-546.
Wohldmann, E., L., Healy, A. F., & Bourne, L. E., Jr. Mental practice leads to less forgetting and interference than physical practice. Paper presented at the 47th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Houston, TX, November 18, 2006.
Healy, A. F., Kole, J. A., Wohldmann, E. L., Buck-Gengler, C. J., Parker, J. T., & Bourne, L. E., Jr. (2005). Optimizing the speed, durability, and transferability of training. In C. Izawa and N. Ohta (Eds.), Human learning and memory: Advances in theory and application (pp. 135-153). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Healy, A. F., Wohldmann, E. L., Parker, J. T., & Bourne, L. E., Jr. (2005). Skill training, retention, and transfer: The effects of a concurrent secondary task. Memory & Cognition, 33, 1457-1471.
Research Interests
My research is concerned with factors that influence learning and memory for knowledge and skills. I am currently doing research in three areas: motor imagery, hand-eye coordination in motor control, and how divided attention affects time perception. However, I am also interested in conducting studies to examine factors that influence decision-making, especially related to consumer choices, as well as experiments to test divided attention in driving performance.
Motor Imagery: I conduct laboratory research on people’s ability to use motor imagery to learn new motor skills and for maintaining motor skills over long delays. This research has important theoretical implications for understanding motor control and motor programming. In addition, it has numerous practical applications to rehabilitation, recovery from injury, as well as skill learning and training.
Cognitive Factors that Influence Decision-Making about Nutrition and the Environment: Experiments are designed to examine how and why people make the choices that they make with regard to nutrition and the environment. The goal of this research is to understand cognitive factors that influence decision-making, as well as to examine ways of presenting information that will enable people make healthy and sustainable choices.
Stimulus-Response Incompatibility: These experiments are designed to examine how people learn to perform tasks that require unusual patterns of hand-eye coordination. If you try to turn your computer mouse sideways, you’ll find that it is quite difficult to navigate on your computer. However, with practice, you’ll notice that your performance improves over time. By understanding the cognitive processes required to learn this type of simple task, we can understand how knowledge is represented in the mind, learn about generalization of knowledge, and better train people to perform well under similar circumstances.
Divided Attention and Time Perception: Practice makes perfect, or so the saying goes. This is especially true under conditions of divided attention. My research in this area examines how the skill of time production change as a function of secondary task demands. In the past, we have found learning to be highly specific to the task requirements, and future research will explore conditions under which learning is more flexible.