My research interests have always centered on a question I first asked myself when I was about 12 years old: Why is it that humans, who have the capacity to reason so well, often reason so poorly? Good reasoning depends on many things including: (1) acquiring useful information, (2) accessing the information, (3) adapting what you know to novel situations, and (4) understanding the causes of events. Thus, my research spans topics in both thinking and memory and in both cognitive and social psychology. Recently, I have also become interested in applying this research to issues in the legal system and in decision making generally.

Primary Interests:

Applied Social Psychology
Judgment and Decision Making
Law and Public Policy
Person Perception
Social Cognition

Applied Social Psychology
Judgment and Decision Making
Law and Public Policy

Person Perception
Social Cognition

Research Group or Laboratory:

Reasoning, Memory, and Law Laboratory
Interactive Map

Journal Articles:

Anderson, M. C., & Spellman, B. A. (1995). On the status of inhibitory mechanisms in cognition: Memory retrieval as a model case. Psychological Review, 102, 68-100.
Cohen, L. B., Rundell, L. J., Spellman, B. A., & Cashon, C. H. (1999). Infants’ perception of causal chains. Psychological Science, 10, 412-418.
Dunn, E. W., & Spellman, B. A. (2003). Forgetting by remembering: Stereotype inhibition through rehearsal of alternative aspects of identity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 420-433.
Goedert, K. M., Harsch, J., & Spellman, B. A. (in press). Discounting and conditionalization: Dissociable cognitive processes in human causal inference. Psychological Science.
Green, A. J., Spellman, B. A., Dusek, J. A., Eichenbaum, H., & Levy, W. G. (2001). Relational learning with and without awareness: Transitive inference using non-verbal stimuli in humans. Memory & Cognition, 29, 893-902.
Kincannon, A., & Spellman, B. A. (2003). The use of category and similarity information in limiting hypotheses. Memory & Cognition, 31, 114-132.
Spellman, B. A. (1997). Crediting causality. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 126, 1-26.
Spellman, B. A. (1996). Acting as intuitive scientists: Contingency judgments are made while controlling for alternative potential causes. Psychological Science, 7, 337-342.
Spellman, B. A., & Holyoak, K. J. (1996). Pragmatics in analogical mapping. Cognitive Psychology, 31, 307-366.
Spellman, B. A., & Holyoak, K. J. (1992). If Saddam is Hitler then who is George Bush? Analogical mapping between systems of social roles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 913-933.
Spellman, B. A., Holyoak, K. J., & Morrison, R. G. (2001). Analogical priming via semantic relations. Memory & Cognition, 29, 383-393.
Spellman, B. A., & Mandel, D. R. (1999). When possibility informs reality: Counterfactual thinking as a cue to causality. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8, 120-123.
Spellman, B. A., Price, C. M., & Logan, J. (2001). How two causes are different from one: The use of (un)conditional information in Simpson’s paradox. Memory & Cognition, 29, 193-208.

Other Publications:

Robinson, P. H., & Spellman, B. A. (2005). Sentencing decisions: Matching the decisionmaker to the decision nature. Columbia Law Review, 105(4), 1124-1161.
Spellman, B. A., Kincannon, A., & Stose, S. (2005). The relation between counterfactual and causal reasoning. Invited chapter to appear in D. R. Mandel, D. J. Hilton, & P. Catellani (Eds.), The psychology of counterfactual thinking. London: Routledge Research.

Courses Taught:

Advanced Experimental Methods
Causal and Counterfactual Reasoning
Cognition
Psychology and Law: Cognitive and Social Issues
Psychology of Information and Persuasion
Research Methods and Data Analysis
Thinking About Thinking
Thinking and Reasoning

Advanced Experimental Methods
Causal and Counterfactual Reasoning
Cognition
Psychology and Law: Cognitive and Social Issues
Psychology of Information and Persuasion

Research Methods and Data Analysis
Thinking About Thinking
Thinking and Reasoning

Note from the Network: The holder of this profile has certified having all necessary rights, licenses, and authorization to post the files listed below. Visitors are welcome to copy or use any files for noncommercial or journalistic purposes provided they credit the profile holder and cite this page as the source.

Image Gallery

Photo of Barbara Spellman

9.16MB

Barbara Spellman
Department of Psychology
University of Virginia
102 Gilmer Hall, P.O. Box 400400
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400
United States

Phone: (434) 982-5591
Fax: (434) 982-4766