معرفی
Lisa Fournier is an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at Washington State University, where she has established herself as a prominent researcher in cognitive psychology with a focus on visual attention, memory, perception, and action. She teaches courses including Honors Introductory Psychology, Research Methods, Sensation and Perception, History of Psychology, and Cognitive Psychology.
Dr. Fournier earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1993. Her research primarily focuses on how humans represent and manage multiple action plans for daily activities and new pursuits. She examines how action plans are represented in working memory and how managing multiple plans affects execution. Her secondary research line explores 'precrastination'—the tendency to start or finish tasks immediately even when it requires more physical effort, which appears to be a strategy to reduce cognitive load. Her lab utilizes behavioral measures (reaction time and accuracy) as well as EEG to investigate these phenomena.
Analysis of Dr. Fournier's recent publications reveals a consistent focus on action planning, precrastination phenomena, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying decision making. Her work increasingly examines individual differences in these processes and extends into areas like the effects of cannabis on cognitive performance. The research demonstrates a progression from basic mechanisms of action control to applied contexts involving real-world decision making and task sequencing.
Dr. Fournier has maintained a productive research program through an Educational Partnership Agreement with the U.S. Air Force Research Lab, which has supported high-tech equipment for simulating real-world displays. She has mentored numerous graduate and undergraduate students who have co-authored publications with her and presented research at conferences. Her laboratory, the Attention, Perception & Performance Lab, has documented groups from 2008-2019 showing consistent involvement of students across multiple years.
Dr. Fournier's laboratory investigates three main areas: action planning and perception (how holding action plans in memory affects other actions), precrastination phenomena, and within-object feature selection (conjunction benefits). Her research integrates theories of action planning with perception and memory to provide a comprehensive understanding of how action plans are represented in the human mind, with potential applications for improving goal-directed behaviors in populations with compromised memory.
