Stephani M. Foraker
Assistant Professor
(716) 878-6027
Campus Address: Classroom Building A309
forakesm@buffalostate.edu
Dr. Stephani Foraker is a cognitive psychologist, specializing in memory and psycholinguistics. She is interested in how we communicate with each other, asking how our voice, our body, and different aspects of language affect how easily we can remember something. Stephani received a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Akron, OH, and earned her Ph.D. at New York University in 2004. Prior to joining Buffalo State College in 2008, she was a post-doctoral researcher at The University of Chicago.
Research Interests:
My research focuses on two main issues. The first is the relationship between cognition and language, and the second is on "embodied" aspects of how we communicate. Below are some questions to give you an idea of how I study these issues.
Relationship between cognition & language
- When and how do working memory and attention affect our understanding of words that need to be linked, but are far apart from each other?
- When you’re trying to figure out what a pronoun means, like "she", what kinds of linguistic information lead to retrieval interference?
- Are word meanings stored and retrieved from memory, or are they constructed "on the fly"?
"Embodied" communication
- How do our hand/arm gestures reflect what we are thinking, and how do they contribute to understanding?
- How does emphasizing something with your voice affect what your conversation partner will understand and remember?
- Are our gestures designed for our conversation partner, or for our own thinking?
Please visit Dr. Foraker’s web page for more information on getting involved in research projects, doing an independent study or honors thesis, and information on current classes.
[ http://faculty.buffalostate.edu/forakesm/ ]
Courses taught:
Cognitive Psychology (psy 340)
Sensation and Perception (psy 308)
Psycholinguistics (psy 430)
Research Methods in Psychology (psy 450w)
Representative Publications and Presentations:
Foraker, S., Nusbaum, H. C., & Schoeneman, S.* (under review). Prominence facilitates retrieval by increasing the distinctiveness of referents in memory.
Foraker, S., Regier, T., Khetarpal, N., Perfors, A., & Tenenbaum, J. (in press). Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus: The case of anaphoric “one”. Cognitive Science.
Foraker, S., & McElree, B. (2007). The role of prominence in pronoun resolution: Active versus passive representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 357-383.
McElree, B., Foraker, S., & Dyer, L. (2003). Memory structures that subserve sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 67-91.
Foraker, S. & Goldin-Meadow S. (2007). Gesture and discourse: How we use our hands to refer back. Poster at the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, August 2-4, Nashville, TN.
Foraker, S. (2007). Explicit versus implicit prosody: Effects on pronoun interpretation. Poster at the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, March 29-31, La Jolla, CA.
* undergraduate student author