Jeffrey Wammes
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
B.A., University of Western Ontario, 2011
M.A., University of Waterloo, 2014
Ph.D., University of Waterloo, 2017
Name Pronunciation Guide:
"jef WAW-miss"
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Research Interests
My research focuses on understanding how learning and experience can fundamentally reshape the way we represent information in memory, as well as how our representational spaces are actively reorganized to facilitate retrieval from memory. To address these questions, I have studied the costs of divided attention, the benefits of active learning tasks (e.g. drawing, motor enactment), and the changes in patterns of brain activity elicited by regularities in our environment. In other work, I have explored the experience of mind-wandering, a commonly experienced phenomenon where our thoughts drift away from what we are currently doing and toward internal thoughts and concerns. Specifically, I am interested in how episodes of mind wandering impact learning and performance, and how mind wandering might be reduced in educational settings. I use behavioural experiments, computational tools, and functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate these and related questions, and wherever possible, I conduct experiments that relate the laboratory to the real-world (e.g. long-term studies in actual university classrooms).
Selected Publications
In addition:
Fan, J. E., Wammes, J. D., Gunn, J. B., Yamins, D. L. K., Norman, K. A. & Turk-Browne, N. B. (2020). Relating visual production and recognition of objects in human visual cortex. Journal of Neuroscience. 40, 1710-1721
Wammes, J. D., Jonker, T. R., & Fernandes, M. A. (2019). Drawing improves memory: The importance of multimodal encoding context. Cognition, 191, 103955.
Wammes, J. D., Ralph, B. C., Mills, C., Bosch, N., Duncan, T. L., & Smilek, D. (2019). Disengagement during lectures: Media multitasking and mind wandering in university classrooms. Computers & Education, 132, 76-89.
Wammes, J. D., Meade, M. E., & Fernandes, M. A. (2018). Creating a recollection-based memory through drawing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44, 734-751.
Wammes, J. D., & Fernandes, M. A. (2017). The residual protective effects of enactment. Cognition, 164, 87-101.
Wammes, J. D., & Smilek, D. (2017). Examining the influence of lecture format on degree of mind wandering. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 6, 174-184.
Wammes, J. D., Meade, M. E., & Fernandes, M. A. (2016). The drawing effect: Evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69, 1752-1776 .