JASON M. WATSON
Jason Watson
email: jason.watson@psych.utah.edu		 Assistant Professor of Psychology
Assistant Investigator of The Brain Institute

Brain and Behavior

B.A. 1995, University of Arkansas; M.A. 2000, Washington University in St. Louis; Ph.D. 2001, Washington University in St. Louis; Post-doctoral Fellow 2002-2004, Washington University in St. Louis; Research Scientist 2004-2005, Washington University in St. Louis.

RESEARCH:

Three of the most fundamental questions in Cognitive Science are concerned with (1) how people read words, (2) how people remember events, and (3) how people stay "on task" by minimizing the influence of potentially distracting information. Although there have been several important findings in these three areas of research, there have been very few attempts to bridge the gaps in knowledge accumulated thus far on word recognition, memory, and cognitive control. Yet there must be a fundamental (and perhaps synergistic) relationship among these three cognitive processes.

The goal of my research is to bridge the scientific work conducted thus far on reading, remembering, and cognitive control in an attempt to gain a richer understanding of brain-behavior relations. To accomplish this goal, I am pursuing several converging lines of research in my Cognitive Science Lab at The University of Utah including but not limited to: (1) behavioral studies of individual differences in cognitive control in young adults that may mediate susceptibility to associative memory illusions, (2) functional neuroimaging studies of individual and age differences in reading, remembering, and cognitive control (3) and other large scale behavioral and neuroimaging studies that systematically compare the influence of lexical variables like frequency, concreteness, and spelling-to-sound correspondence on reading and memory performance.

Given the inter-disciplinary nature of Cognitive Science, in my lab, we employ a variety of methods from Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Neuropsychology to gain leverage in answering empirical questions about brain-behavior relations. For example, to investigate reading, remembering, and cognitive control, we (1) may measure reaction times using naming and lexical decision tasks, (2) may measure memory using free recall and episodic recognition tasks, (3) may conduct cross-population studies with healthy old adults or neuropsychological participants like Alzheimer's patients, and (4) may use functional neuroimaging techniques to determine the underlying neural correlates of a hypothesized cognitive process.

Selected Publications

Baciu, M. V., Watson, J. M., Maccotta, L., McDermott, K. B., Buckner, R. L., Gilliam, F. G., and Ojemann, J. G. (2005) Evaluating functional MRI procedures for assessing hemispheric language dominance in neurosurgical patients. Neuroradiology, 47:835-844. (PDF)

Chan, J. C. K., McDermott, K. B., Watson, J. M., and Gallo, D. A. (2005) The importance of material-processing interactions in inducing false memories. Memory and Cognition, 33:389-395. (PDF)

Watson, J. M., Bunting, M. F., Poole, B. J., and Conway, A. R. A. (2005) Individual differences in susceptibility to false memory in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31:76-85. (PDF)

Cortese, M. J., Watson, J. M., Wang, J., and Fugett, A. (2004) Relating distinctive orthographic and phonological processes to episodic memory performance. Memory and Cognition, 32:632-639. (PDF)

Moritz, S., Woodward, T. S., Cuttler, C., Whitman, J., and Watson, J. M. (2004) False memories in schizophrenia. Neuropsychology, 18, 276-283. (PDF)

Watson, J. M., McDermott, K. B., and Balota, D. A. (2004) Attempting to avoid false memories in the Deese/ Roediger-McDermott paradigm: Assessing the combined influence of practice and warnings in young and old adults. Memory and Cognition, 32:135-141. (PDF)

Baciu, M. V., Watson, J. M., McDermott, K. B., Wetzel, R. D., Attarian, H., Moran, C. J., and Ojemann, J. G. (2003) Functional MRI reveals an inter-hemispheric dissociation of frontal and temporal language regions in a patient with focal epilepsy. Epilepsy and Behavior, 4:776-780. (PDF)

McDermott, K. B., Petersen, S. E, Watson, J. M., and Ojemann, J. G. (2003) A procedure for identifying regions preferentially activated by attention to semantic and phonological relations using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Neuropsychologia, 41:293-303. (PDF)

Watson, J. M., Balota, D. A., and Roediger, H. L. (2003) Creating false memories with hybrid lists of semantic and phonological associates: Over-additive false memories produced by converging associative networks. Journal of Memory and Language, 49:95-118. (PDF)

McDermott, K. B., and Watson, J. M. (2001) The rise and fall of false recall: The impact of presentation duration. Journal of Memory and Language, 45:160-176. (PDF)

Roediger, H. L., Watson, J. M., McDermott, K. B., and Gallo, D. A. (2001) Factors that determine false recall: A multiple regression analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 8:385-407. (PDF)

Watson, J. M., Balota, D. A., and Sergent-Marshall, S. D. (2001) Semantic, phonological, and hybrid veridical and false memories in healthy older adults and in individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer Type. Neuropsychology, 15:254-267. (PDF)

Balota, D. A.,Watson, J. M., Duchek, J. M., and Ferraro, F.R. (1999) Cross-modal semantic and homograph priming in healthy young, healthy old, and in Alzheimer's disease individuals. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 5:626-640. (PDF)

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