Psychology
Christopher Kurby
 Assistant ProfessorB.A., M.A., Ph.D., Northern Illinois University office: 2117 Au Sable Hall phone: (616) 331-2418 email: kurbyc@gvsu.edu
Spring/Summer Office Hours
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We are currently building an adult participant pool for studies on aging. If you are interested in learning more, please click here!
Specialization
Cognitive Psychology, Event Cognition, Cognitive Aging
Courses Taught
Cognitive Psychology, Event Cognition, Cognitive Aging
Courses Taught
PSY 364 - Life-Span Developmental Psychology
PSY 400 - Advanced Research in Psychology
Current Research Interests
I study how people comprehend and remember the events they experience. Within this general theme, I investigate how people understand the events described in the stories they read, the daily activities they engage in, and the movies they watch. The activities we perceive in everyday life are continuous, yet we typically remember them as composed of separate events. For example, a trip to the zoo breaks down into entering the park, visiting the animals, and exiting. Making a sandwich breaks down into collecting the ingredients, and assembling them. In order to comprehend events effectively, we must be able to break down activity into these part-subpart structures. I am interested in the causes and consequences of this segmentation on comprehension, and how this process changes as we age. How we perceive activity is likely related to how we produce it on our own. A long-term goal of my aging research is to understand this relation in order to improve performance in old age. I also study the kinds of representations people use when constructing event representations, particularly during language comprehension. A recent theory of comprehension argues that readers generate perceptual simulations of the events described by language. I study how these simulations may participate in comprehension and how they relate to readers' experience of mental imagery.
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Selected Publications
Bailey, H.R., Zacks, J.M., Hambrick, D.Z., Zacks, R.T., Head, D., Kurby, C.A., & Sargent, J.Q. (in press). Medial temporal lobe volume predicts elder’s everyday memory. Psychological Science.
Ozuru, Y., Kurby, C.A., & McNamara, D.S. (2012). The effect of metacomprehension judgment task on comprehension monitoring and metacognitive accuracy. Metacognition and Learning, 7, 113-131.
Briner, S.W., Virtue, S., & Kurby, C.A. (2012). Processing causality in narrative events: Temporal order matters. Discourse Processes, 49, 61-77.
Kurby, C.A., & Zacks, J.M. (2012). Starting from scratch and building brick by brick in comprehension. Memory & Cognition, 40, 812-826.
Kurby, C.A., & Zacks, J.M. (2011). Age differences in the perception of hierarchical structure in events. Memory & Cognition, 39, 75-91. NIHMSID: 263761.
Tse, C., Kurby, C.A., & Du, F. (2010). Perceptual simulations and linguistic representations have differential effects on speeded relatedness judgements and recognition memory. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 928-941.
Kurby, C.A., Magliano, J.P., & Rapp, D.N. (2009). Those voices in your head: The cross modal activation of auditory images during reading. Cognition, 112, 457-461.
Kurby, C.A., & Zacks, J.M. (2008). Segmentation in the perception and memory of events. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 72-79.
Page last modified May 16, 2013
