Heather Bailey

Heather Bailey, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychological Sciences at Kansas State University, where she directs the Memory & Aging Laboratory and co-leads the NIH-funded Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Approaches to Plasticity (C-NAP). Her work integrates behavioral experimentation, eye-tracking, and fMRI to understand how younger and older adults encode, segment, and retrieve everyday events, with emphasis on strategy use, prior knowledge, and clinical conditions such as PTSD, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Education:

• Ph.D. Cognitive Psychology, Kent State University, 2009
• M.S. Experimental Psychology, Wake Forest University, 2005
• Post-doctoral fellow, Washington University in St. Louis, 2009-2013

Research Interests: Dr. Bailey’s program centers on three inter-related themes: (1) identifying effective memory strategies and the conditions under which they benefit learners; (2) uncovering how individuals segment continuous experience into meaningful events and update working memory accordingly; and (3) examining how semantic knowledge scaffolds memory for novel activities in healthy and clinical aging. These lines leverage eye-tracking, neuroimaging, and naturalistic paradigms to link cognitive theory to real-world memory performance.

Recent Funding:

• National Institutes of Health R01, "The role of prior knowledge and event segmentation in age- and Alzheimer’s-related changes in event memory," $2,060,857, 2022-2027
• National Institutes of Health R03, "Situation model updating in young and older adults," $170,128, 2011-2014
• K-State / Wichita State COBRE pilot, "Transfer effects of perceptual learning on driving-related cognitive tasks," $12,100, 2013
• K-State University Small Research Grant, "Plasticity in Aging and Memory for Everyday Events," $4,000, 2014

Student Mentoring: Graduate students join ongoing projects or develop independent studies, gain statistical and methodological expertise, co-author publications, and may complete a distinctive teaching apprenticeship. Undergraduates enroll in PSYCH 599 to engage in experiment design, data collection with young and/or older adults, statistical analysis, and conference presentation.