Dana M. Basnight-Brown
(BA, Houghton College, 2001; MA, 2004; PHD, 2009)

Dana is a member of the Laboratory who recently completed her PhD in 2009. Her doctoral dissertation work focused on the processes involved in translating different word types across languages. Her research interests include bilingualism, second language acquisition, the processing of emotion, and cognitive control in bilingual speakers. Her work has been published in the following journals: Memory & Cognition, Journal of Memory & Language, The Mental Lexicon, Behavior Research Methods, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, and Cognition and Emotion. She has also co-authored several chapters that appear in books on cognitive and psycholinguistic topics such as word recognition, morphological processing, and speech disorders. In addition to research, she has served as a lecturer or visiting professor at the University at Albany, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, College of Saint Rose, and Skidmore College. Currently, Dana holds the position of Postdoctoral Research Associate within the Laboratory.

Email address: dana.basnightbrown@gmail.com

Stephanie A. Kazanas
(BS, University of Scranton, 2008; MS, Shippensburg University, 2010; PHD, expected 2015)

Stephanie recently finished her first year of coursework as a Ph.D student after completing a Master’s in general psychology. She is primarily interested in psycholinguistics, specifically second language acquisition and its related phenomena. Prior research has included a thesis on the mediating influence of verbal ability on problem-solving performance, which was presented as a poster at the 23rd Annual Convention of the Association for Psychological Science and is undergoing revisions for publication. Her research within the Lab has focused on investigating the differences between priming emotion and emotion-laden words. While running subjects for this experiment, she has begun to develop an N-back task that can be used in the future to assess the relevance of working memory and cognitive control to many of the Lab's diverse research interests.

Email address: sk118319@albany.edu

Hugh Knickerbocker
(BA, Marist College, 2006; MA, Marist College, 2008; MA, University at Albany, 2011; PHD expected 2013)

Hugh recently completed his Master's thesis research work, entitled The Influence of Emotion on the Reptition Blindness Effect in Monlingual and Bilingual Speakers. He is interested in the relationship between cognition and emotion and bilingualism. He has completed a book chapter on Bilingualism for Linguistic Relativity and Bilingual Cognition: A Different Way of Thinking. The chapter included research into Repetition Blindness (RB) with bilingual participants. He is currently conducting research on the salience of the RB effect with emotion and emotion-laden words, the influence of emotion on eye movements while reading, and the semantic and lexical links formed during the initial acquisition of a second language. He has recently co-authored a chapter on this latter topic that appears in the volume entitled Insights from Psycholinguistics: Applying Priming Research to L2 Learning and Teaching.

Email address: hk872277@albany.edu