Because I've worked in cognitive memory labs since my undergraduate days, I have a strong interest and passion for understanding how students learn and remember. In my honors thesis, I worked in the labs of Peter Delaney and Michael Kane to investigate the role of working memory capacity in spaced learning. Previous research finds that spacing out one’s need to be learned information is better for memory compared to cramming study (i.e., massed learning, Glenberg, 1976; Malmberg & Shiffrin, 2005; also see Delaney, Verkoeijen & Spirgel, 2010; Maddox, 2016). As such, I hypothesized that working memory could potentially moderate the effect of spaced learning on cued recall. This was expected to be the case because lower working memory individuals not only have fewer “cognitive resources” at their disposal but have also been shown to have a more difficult time with attentional control, goal maintenance, and mind-wandering relative to higher span individuals (Kane & Engle, 2003; Engle & Kane, 2004; Kane et al., 2007; also see Conway, Kane & Engle, 2003).
Predicting that higher spans would benefit more from spacing relative to lower spans, it was interesting however, to find only main effects of spacing and working memory (and while higher spans remembered more overall)--both higher and lower spans benefitted similarly from the effect of spaced study over repeated study sessions (Delaney, Godbole, Holden & Chang, 2017)! This finding emphasizes the importance of spacing (as opposed to cramming) study and retrieval practice over time for optimal performance. This project also deepened my interest in working memory capacity as a construct and how it is/isn’t separable from long term memory. Peter and I are currently working on a project investigating individual differences in the effect of stereotype threat on spaced learning and retrieval.
From left: UNC Greensboro graduation with Peter Delaney, Towson University graduation with Kerri Goodwin, APS 2013 with Kerri Goodwin and friends, At dinner with Andrew Conway and labmates
Graduate Work
Next, I spent two years completing my Masters in Experimental Psychology at Towson University. Working with Kerri Goodwin, this program allowed me to think more critically about how false memories and memory errors may be just as important to consider in contexts of student learning and achievement as so-called “correct” memories. Exploring the role of WMC and source monitoring ability (SM) in false memory production, we found that WMC and SM interact such that false memories during recognition were the lowest when WMC was high and SM ability was below average. This suggests that potential monitoring benefits of higher WMC may function optimally for constraining false memory under conditions of lower SM ability. That is, under conditions of high WMC and high SM abilities being better able to correctly identify the source information associated with the context of the memory could spread activation more and in turn, this could predict more rather than less false memories (Holden, Conway & Goodwin, under review)!
I began to think more about intelligence and how this impacts one’s sense of self, motivation and achievement, I was drawn to Princeton to work with their top intelligence researcher at the time—Andrew Conway. I further explored these interests in my dissertation working withAndrew Conway and Stacey Sinclair. Having decided that I wanted to think more critically about many arguments posed in the intelligence literature, and then focusing on the nature and predictive power of innate abilities, Andrew and I began a project on investigating stereotype threat and its impact on working memory and other types of cognitive performance. My work with Andrew emphasized the importance of context, and culture and identity when looking at students’ standardized test performance. In this project, I proposed an idea about how stereotype threat might impact student cognition and performance. Stereotype Threat theory posits that making salient the group or social identity that is negatively stereotyped can cause unintentional and harmful effects on performance (Steele & Aronson, 1995). Importantly, the theory states that one need not believe the stereotype in order for it to impact performance. I aimed to demonstrate the importance of context and abilities by proposing that working memory capacity can both potentially protect students from threat effects (higher WMC span moderates threat) as well as explain (WMC span mediates threat) the impact threat has on performance. We found evidence that having higher trait WMC helps Black students combat the effects of stereotype threat on test performance (Holden, Goodwin & Conway, under review). In subsequent studies I have also been investigating individual differences in personality/character and mindset as potential moderators of the threat effect as well.
Other Projects
With Andrew and others, I conducted a project on Mindset and its real-world impact on cognitive performance outcomes. In a large-scale collaborative project, I explored the effect of a mindset intervention in reducing statistics anxiety in a Massive Online Open Course or MOOC called “Statistics One.” The results of the project are currently being written up for publication (Holden, Moreau, Greene & Conway, in prep).
In summer 2016, I worked as an intern at the Educational Testing Servicewhere I developed a collaborative project with Malcolm Bauer and Michelle LaMar. We explored the impact of Mindset on student decision-making and performance during an innovative assessment. Using Markov Decision Process Simulation techniques we were able to model student action and decision making based on having either a fixed or malleable mindset. I was invited to present this work at the National Council on Measurement in Education in May 2017. The paper on this project is currently under review for publication (Holden, LaMar & Bauer, under review) and available as a preprint. I am interested to learn more about the MDP simulation approach to possibly use this method in my future work.