معرفی
Dr. Michelle Jarick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at MacEwan University. She holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Waterloo and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia's BARLab (Brain and Attention Research Lab). Her research focuses on perception, cognition, and brain-behavior relationships, with particular emphasis on synesthesia and the effects of eye contact on memory and arousal. She has published extensively in journals like Cortex and Journal of Neuropsychology.
Key research areas include: (1) Synesthesia mechanisms involving spatial perception and cross-modal interactions, (2) Social perception dynamics of eye contact duration and its cognitive consequences, and (3) Gambling psychology examining cognitive biases in slot machine gameplay. Recent work explores how prolonged eye contact affects memory retention and arousal levels across genders.
- Education: PhD (Waterloo), Postdoc at UBC
- Professional Affiliations: Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science; Vision Science Society
Her 2022 article in Psychology of Learning and Motivation demonstrated that excessive eye contact impairs memory retention through overstimulation of social attention systems. This aligns with her earlier findings on arousal modulation during mutual gaze. Her slot machine studies reveal how visual and auditory cues distort gambling outcome perceptions, contributing to addictive behaviors.
Grants & Awards: Held Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at UBC (2011–2012). Current research supported by SSHRC grants examining attention mechanisms in social perception.
Teaching includes courses in perception (PSYC 258), cognitive psychology (PSYC 267), and introductory psychology (PSYC 104). She actively supervises senior students' independent study projects.
