Scientist Spotlight: Q&A with Nora Newcombe, PhD

In lay-friendly terms, what’s the big question your work is addressing?

My research concerns cognitive development and adult cognition. More specifically, I work on several different topics, including memory, navigation, and spatial thinking. At an abstract level, in each of these areas, I want to answer questions like: How do we go from our species-specific newborn capabilities to our mature capacities? How is that developmental sequence influenced by environmental input? Why do people differ? Can they change and if so, how much, when, and in response to what kinds of training or incentives?

What scholars’ work, recent papers, or recent discoveries have recently gotten you most excited?

What a tough question! Every day I find something new to be excited about. Our field is moving so fast. For most of my life, I used purely behavioral methods, but I’ve been privileged recently to collaborate with colleagues trained in cognitive neuroscience—including Ingrid Olson, Jason Chein, and Russell Epstein—and that’s been fascinating and led to lots of new reading. I also try to keep in touch with what we can learn from non-human animals, and that has alerted me to a whole new community of people who study the topics I love, but with different techniques.

In a very different spirit, some of my work has translational implications for education, especially mathematical thinking and learning, and I have been collaborating with Nancy Jordan and Liz Gunderson on research on topics like early understanding of fractions and why women are less likely to enter STEM disciplines.

What question do you wish more people were asking/working on in your area/sub-discipline?

I wish people would read and think more broadly, rather than concentrate on one species, one age, or one topic. I wish they would integrate thinking about normative development with thinking about individual differences. I wish they would avoid dichotomies like heredity versus environment, and nature versus nurture.

What are you working on now?

Lots of things! My big project is the launch of a longitudinal study on memory development covering ages 4 to 6 years and 6 to 8 years. With Ingrid Olson, I am seeking to understand how real-world autobiographical memory and lab-based measures of episodic memory relate to each other, and each relates to neural development, especially hippocampal subfields and white matter. We also have a diversity supplement to our graduate student Kim Nguyen, who is adding navigation to the mix.

What do you wish you knew when you were first starting off as a new PhD?

I wish I had understood how young psychology was as an empirical science. It’s much more mature now, and our most interesting and exciting times lie ahead!