Research

Future-Oriented Thinking

I have conducted research on future-oriented cognition for the past 22 years. I seek to better understand how we can maintain competing motives such as attending to an ongoing conversation while maintaining in mind an intention to carry out a future action and how these motives compete for attention and shape people’s judgments, choices, and behaviors. I am widely cited in my field and some of this work can be found in leading journals such as Memory and Cognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Applied Cognitive Psychology, and Memory.

In 2017, I co-authored a book on memory for future action titled Prospective Memory: Remembering to Remember, Remembering to Forget (link) published by Springer Nature.

In a recent paper, my co-authors and I showed that when we create a representation for a future action that we intend to carry out, we may later mistakenly misattribute that intention as memory for actual performance.

Cohen, A-L., Silverstein, M. J., Derksen, D. G., Hamzagic, Z. I., Lindsay, D.S. & Bernstein, D. M. (2020). Future planning may promote false memories. Journal of Applied Research on Memory and Cognition, 9, 242-253. (link)

Narrative Transportation

More recently, I examine the way movies drive our sensory, conceptual, and emotional processes. I am interested in the uniquely human ability to project ourselves into a story narrative. Narrative transportation is the term that describes the feeling when we become lost in a story whether it is through written literature, film, or live theater. In one research paper, we examined how research subjects neglected their task instructions as they became immersed in an Alfred Hitchcock film scene by scene.

Cohen, A-L., Goldberg, C., Mintz, J., & Shavalian, E. (2023). Spoiler alert: How narrative film captures attention. Applied Cognitive Psychology. doi.org/10.1002/acp.4070 (link)

Cohen A-L, Shavalian E, & Rube M (2015) The power of the picture: How narrative film captures attention and disrupts goal pursuit. PLoS ONE 10(12): e0144493. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0144493 (link)