معرفی
Dr. Katherine White serves as Professor of Psychology and Director of the Cognition and Aging Lab at Rhodes College. Her research program investigates cognitive mechanisms underlying language production across the lifespan, with particular focus on how linguistic, attentional, and emotional factors influence word retrieval in younger and older adults. She holds the Winton M. Blount Professorship in Social Sciences.
Her educational background includes:
- Ph.D. in Cognitive and Sensory Processes from the University of Florida
- M.S. in Psychology from the University of Florida
- B.A. in Psychology from Rhodes College
White's research spans cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and aging science. She examines tip-of-the-tongue phenomena, written language production errors, and emotional influences on speech fluency through controlled experiments and naturalistic communication settings. Her work reveals how attentional control modulates emotional interference during speech, how aging affects orthographic encoding, and how semantic factors influence word retrieval failures. Current projects explore multimodal communication through gesture-speech interactions in collaboration with Pomona College.
Analysis of her publication record shows consistent evolution from foundational studies on tip-of-the-tongue states and written errors toward increasingly complex investigations of emotional and multimodal aspects of language production. Recent work integrates aging, emotion, and naturalistic communication contexts, reflecting theoretical expansion from isolated laboratory paradigms to ecologically valid models of real-world language use.
White actively mentors undergraduate researchers through her Cognition and Aging Lab. Lab alumni regularly present at national conferences including the Psychonomic Society and Cognitive Aging Conference. Many graduates pursue advanced degrees in psychology (clinical, neuropsychology, geropsychology) or health professions (MD, PharmD, Speech Pathology). Her training program emphasizes hands-on research experience in experimental design, data collection, and scientific communication.
The Cognition and Aging Lab operates as an interdisciplinary research hub investigating language-cognition interactions across adulthood. Current projects include multimodal communication studies examining gesture's role in speech production and investigations of emotional content's impact on narrative fluency in aging populations. The lab maintains active collaborations with cognitive science programs at other institutions while serving as a training ground for future scientists.
