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Lisa Evans

Dr Lisa Evans

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Available for postgraduate supervision
School of Psychology

Overview

Research summary

My research interests are in the area of human episodic memory, which is memory for our personal past. One strand of research in this area aims to refine psychological models of memory to gain a better understanding of the processes that contribute to recognition memory judgments and how they relate to each other. Another question that I am investigating is how healthy individuals are able to selectively retrieve relevant information without retrieving a flood of irrelevant memories. All this research takes a multi-modal approach (behavioural, EEG, MEG and fMRI) which permits an integrated analysis of the processes, time course and brain regions implicated in episodic memory.

My second area of interest is in examining the cognitive deficits present in individuals within the schizophrenia spectrum and elucidating the potential link with clinical symptoms. This work has examined attention, learning and more recently memory deficits and has used a range of techniques (eg. behavioural, pharmacological, EMG and EEG).

Teaching summary

I teach at all levels of the Undergraduate Psychology degree and also on the Masters course in Neuroimaging. I give a series of 6 lectures on memory to students in the first year of the Psychology degree for Language and Memory, these cover: factors which affect encoding and retrieval from memory, source memory and schizophrenia, amnesia and forgetting. I supervise final year students on their research projects. These are usually on some aspect of memory e.g. false memory, reality monitoring, episodic future thinking; and some of these projects also examine schizotypy. I am a Personal Tutor to students at various levels of the Undergraduate degree.

 

Publication

2024

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Articles

Research

Research topics and related papers

Episodic Memory
Currently the focus of my work is on human episodic memory, particularly memory retrieval. One strand of research is to refine psychological models of memory to gain a better understanding of the processes that contribute to recognition memory judgments and how they relate to each other. Electrophysiological research has been influential in suggesting that there are two distinct processes: recollection and familiarity, but it is controversial how these processes are related to each other. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG) indices of memory retrieval processes we have been able to adjudicate between different accounts and find strong support that recollection and familiarity make independent contributions to memory judgments. This was achieved by averaging measures of neural activity and contrasting across different conditions of interest.

In other work we are investigating memory control processes. Over time, a huge amount of episodic information is stored in memory, and different situations require the selective and strategic retrieval of specific elements of contextual information that are relevant to the task at hand. Healthy individuals have the ability to selectively retrieve relevant information without retrieving a flood of irrelevant episodic memories, indicating that episodic retrieval is effectively guided and constrained by control processes. Our work using EEG aims to identify and determine the functional significance of these control processes and the different stages of retrieval at which they operate.

Clinical Psychology
The  other area of research that I am interested in is a) elucidating the cognitive deficits present in individuals within the schizophrenia spectrum, and b) how  these might be associated with certain clinical symptoms. Most of this work has taken a dimensional approach to schizophrenia and measured schizotypy in healthy volunteers.

Some of this work has examined prediction error, which is the discrepancy between expectation and experience. By minimising this error an individual is able to improve their ability to predict events in their environment. It has been proposed that individuals with schizophrenia may demonstrate an abnormal use of this error signal which results in the formation of inappropriate associations which in turn gives rise to some of the psychotic symptoms. I have examined this using various learning paradigms, such as latent inhibition and Kamin blocking and am currently looking at this in the perceptual domain.

I am also interested in deficits in episodic memory in individuals in the schizophrenia spectrum. These are important because they are one of the strongest predictors of functional outcome in patient groups. I am interested in the ability to determine the origin, or the source, of a memory and in particular making judgements about self versus other e.g. did I do that or did you?; known as Reality Monitoring.

 

Teaching

I teach at all levels of the Undergraduate Psychology degree and also on the Masters course in Neuroimaging. I give a series of 6 lectures on memory to students in the first year of the Psychology degree for Language and Memory, these cover: factors which affect encoding and retrieval from memory, source memory and schizophrenia, amnesia and forgetting. I supervise final year students on their research projects. These are usually on some aspect of memory e.g. false memory, reality monitoring, episodic future thinking; and some of these projects also examine schizotypy. I am a Personal Tutor to students at various levels of the Undergraduate degree.

I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Contact Details

Email EvansLH@cardiff.ac.uk
Telephone +44 29208 70080
Campuses Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre, Maindy Road, Cardiff, CF24 4HQ