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Alva T. Hughes, Ph D
Cognitive Psychologist
Email:
ahughes@rmc.edu
Education:
Ph.D. University of Maryland, 1988
M.S. University of Maryland, 1985
B.S. Randolph-Macon College, 1981
Areas of Interest:
Everyday Memory, Language, Culture and Cognition.
As a cognitive psychologist I teach courses on
Cognition, Everyday Memory and Culture and Cognition. I also teach
the African American psychology course, the Research Methods course
and the Systems and Theories course. I became interested in experimental
psychology as a junior in high school. I came to Randolph-Macon
as an undergraduate knowing that I wanted to major in some area
of psychology but with little understanding of what that meant.
During my junior year here I took a class in Cognitive Psychology.
This course made me start asking the questions that have guided
my research throughout the rest of my career. How do humans store
information? When presented with information which parts are we
most likely to store? What is it that we actually store? Once we
have something stored how do we find it again? When we can't find
it what has gone wrong? These questions of information storage,
mental representation and information loss remain at the center
of my research. Much of the research that I have conducted here
at Randolph-Macon has been in collaboration with students.