About

About

The main focus of Dr. Weiss’ research is on understanding the experience of working, especially in an immediate, first person sense. This includes interest in emotional states, focus of attention, episodic structures of personal experience, and sense of self and agency at work.

More information can be found on the website of the Work Experience Lab.

About

My research interests focus on adult age differences in memory. I want to know what about memory changes as we grow older and what are the causes for those changes. Recently, I have been interested in how context helps, or hurts, younger and older adults with episodic recall. Our research is showing that context can be either facilitative or distracting, and seems to affect memory regardless of age. Older people, however, are not as influenced by contextual factors when the context is not well-integrated with the to-be-remembered information. Other research is examining how cognitive mechanisms may be responsible for much of the age-related variance in memory performance across a variety of tasks. I am also interested in non-human primate models of memory aging.

About

My interests span modern psychometric methods (e.g., item response theory), cognitive and intelligence, and quantitative methods. My main research program has been to integrate cognitive theory into psychometric models and test design. To this goal, I have been developing new item response theory models and conducting empirical research on the cognitive basis of an individual's responses. Recently, this effort has lead to the exciting possibility of "tests without items". That is, items are automatically generated by artificial intelligence to target levels and cognitive sources of difficulty to optimally measure each individual examinee during testing. The measurement areas have included fluid reasoning, spatial ability, mathematical reasoning and verbal comprehension.