Michelle Rizzella

Michelle Rizzella is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where she has been a faculty member since 1996. She earned her B.A. from SUNY at Stonybrook and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire.

• Joined Faculty: 1996
• B.A.: SUNY at Stonybrook
• M.A.: University of New Hampshire
• Ph.D.: University of New Hampshire

Her research lies at the intersection of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics, focusing on how readers construct and maintain mental representations of text. She investigates how memory processes—particularly basic memory mechanisms, autobiographical memory, and discourse processing—shape comprehension. Her work emphasizes the role of context, general world knowledge, character perspective, and the resolution of conflicting information in reading.

Her recent publications, often presented at the Society of Text & Discourse and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, explore topics such as semantic anomalies, elaborative inferences, and situational model updating. These studies reveal consistent trends in how readers dynamically update their mental models during comprehension, integrating prior knowledge with incoming textual information.

• American Psychological Association
• Phi Beta Kappa
• Sigma Xi
• Psi Chi
• Teaching of Psychology Society

Rizzella has advised numerous undergraduate researchers, many of whom are co-authors on her presentations and posters, indicating a strong commitment to mentoring. Her teaching includes foundational courses such as Statistics (PSY 201), Research Methods (PSY 202), and Cognitive Psychology (PSY 231), as well as advanced seminars like Theory & Seminar in Cognition (PSY 335) and Capstone in Cognition (PSY 435). While specific grant information is not listed, her sustained research output and conference participation suggest ongoing scholarly activity.

She is actively engaged in the academic community through professional affiliations and continues to contribute to theoretical models of reading comprehension grounded in memory processes.