Megan Papesh wearing a purple dress and a black coat and smiling at the camera.

Megan H. Papesh, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

College
College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Department
Psychology
Phone
978-934-3968
Office
Coburn Hall, Room 370B
Email
megan_papesh@uml.edu

Expertise

Episodic memory, visual search, unfamiliar face perception/recognition, attentional/viewing fields, eye-tracking, pupillometry

Research Interests

  • Basic and applied questions of human attention, perception, and memory
  • Motivational and social factors in unfamiliar face recognition
  • The influence of task difficulty on incidental memory and attentional spread
  • The impact of statistical contexts and task parameters on visual attentional fields and how this affects early-stage cancer detection

Education

  • BS (2005): Psychology, Baldwin-Wallace College – Berea, OH
  • MA (2008): Psychology, Arizona State University – Tempe, AZ
  • PhD (2012): Psychology, Arizona State University – Tempe, AZ

Selected Awards and Honors

  • Rising Star (2016), Association for Psychological Science
  • Emerging Scholar Rainmaker (2015), Louisiana State University
  • Undergraduate Teaching Award (2014, 2019), Tiger Athletic Foundation

Selected Publications

  • Papesh, M. H. & Goldinger, S. D. (Eds.; in press). Modern Pupillometry: Cognition, Neuroscience, and Practical Applications. Springer Nature.
  • Urgolites, Z. J., Wixted, J. T., Goldinger, S. D., Papesh, M. H., Treiman, D. M., Squire, L. R., & Steinmetz, P. N. (2022). Two kinds of memory signals in neurons of the human hippocampus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(19), e2115128119.
  • Guevara Pinto, J.D., Papesh, M.H., & Hicks, J.L. (2021). Flexible attention allocation dynamically impacts incidental encoding in prospective memory. Memory & Cognition, 1-17. doi: 10.3758/s13421-021-01199-6
  • Papesh, M. H., Hout, M. C., *Guevara Pinto, J. D, Robbins, A., & **Lopez, A. (2021). Eye movements reflect expertise development in hybrid search. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 6(7).
  • *Guevara Pinto, J. D., Papesh, M. H., & Hout, M. C. (2020). The detail is in the difficulty: Challenging search facilitates rich incidental object encoding. Memory & Cognition. doi: 10.3758/s13421-020-01051-3
  • Urgolites, Z., Wixted. J. T., Goldinger, S. D., Papesh, M. H., Squire, L. R., Smith, K. A., Treiman, D. T., & Steinmetz, P. N. (2020). Spiking activity in the human hippocampus prior to encoding predicts subsequent memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(24), 13767-13770. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2001338117
  • Papesh, M. H. & *Guevara Pinto, J. D. (2019). Spotting rare items makes the brain “blink” harder: Evidence from pupillometry. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 81, 2635-2647.
  • Papesh, M. H., Hicks, J. L., & *Guevara-Pinto, J. D. (2019). Retrieval dynamics of recognition and rejection. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72, 2328-2341.
  • *Guevara Pinto, J. D. & Papesh, M. H. (2019). Incidental memory in rapid serial visual search: The role of attention allocation strategies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45, 1174-1190.
  • Hicks, J.L., *Spitler, S., & Papesh, M. H. (2019). Response dynamics of event-based prospective memory retrieval. Memory & Cognition, 47, 923-935.
  • Papesh, M. H., *Heisick, L. L., & **Warner, K. M. (2018). The persistent low-prevalence effect in unfamiliar face-matching: The roles of feedback and criterion shifting. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 24, 416-430.
  • Papesh, M. H. (2018). Photo ID verification remains challenging despite years of practice. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 3:19.