I have been interested in cognitive psychology, especially human memory. For the past three years, I have conducted a series of experiments to develop a new semantic priming paradigm that overcomes the difficulties with standard priming paradigm. The standard priming paradigm separates prime and target and therefore causes potential problems. In the new paradigm, in contrast, there is no prime/target distinction by which difficulties with prior standard paradigm is solved. Using the new paradigm, I was trying to answer some debated questions, such as whether there is “unconscious” semantic priming, how long the “unconscious” semantic priming can last, whether subjects adopt strategies when they are processing the priming task…
More recently, I am turning my research to a more applied direction. My focus now is to explore possibilities of implementing results of basic cognitive research in real world settings. One specific research topic is aging, learning and training. Cognitive aging is an important issue now, since we are moving towards an aging society. Studies have recognized the characteristics associated with elderly people. For example, it is shown that elderly people are much impaired in explicit memory in comparison to young adults but revealed by some indirect measures, such as semantic priming paradigm, their implicit memory is relatively complete. Facing this reality, what we want to step into is to think about what kind of training should be designed and developed to help elderly persons to improve their performance in certain fields where they are less efficient due to aging.
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