Ayanna Kim Thomas
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Ph.D., University of Washington, 2001
ayanna.thomas@tufts.edu

Ayanna Thomas received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Washington in 2001. Ayanna then spent three years as an NIA postdoctoral fellow at Washington University, and one year as a research scientist, studying changes in long-term memory as a function of aging. After teaching at Colby College for two years, Ayanna came to the department of Psychology at Tufts University, where she established the Cognitive Aging and Memory lab in 2007. Ayanna's research examines the contextual cues that younger and older adults rely on when making decisions about memory and metamemory. In so doing, she examine how subjective experience, such as judgments of learning, feeling of knowing, and confidence, is affected by the accessibility of diagnostic and/or deceptive contextual cues. The relationship between subjective experience and objective performance is another important factor in this line of research.

Ayanna's research is based on the assumption that cognitive assessments are made using accessible perceptual and contextual cues; however these cues are often idiosyncratic in nature. Because of the idiosyncratic nature of subjective experience, she employs an individual differences approach to the study of memory and metacognitive accuracy. In her research leverage on theoretical constructs of memory and metacognitive accuracy is gained by: 1. comparing college students to non-demented older adults; 2. comparing non-demented older adults to older adults in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease; 3. dividing non-demented older adults along dimensions of frontal and medial temporal functioning; and 4. dividing college and high school students on reading comprehension ability.

Graduate and Undergraduate students interested in working in the Cognitive Aging and Memory Lab should contact Ayanna at ayanna.thomas@tufts.edu