Frances Balcomb, Ph.D.
Email: fbalcomb@temple.edu
Phone: 215-204-4028
Interests: Cognitive Science; spatial learning and episodic memory in infancy and early childhood; neural substrates of developmental cognition; comparative approaches to understanding problems in cognitive science (metacognition, episodic memory, place learning)
Dr. Frances Balcomb is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Temple University Department of Psychology, and in SILC, (Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center), a multidisciplinary program focused on better understanding spatial learning. Dr. Balcomb’s primary research area is cognitive science, with a specific interest in the developing mind in human infancy and cross-species. Current research with Dr. Nora Newcombe at Temple University and Dr. Lynn Nadel at the University of Arizona explores early emergent spatial navigation and memory skills, adapting paradigms from non-human animals to explore the qualitative nature of developmental cognition related to underlying neurological structures such as the hippocampus. Ongoing research in collaboration with Dr. LouAnn Gerken at the University of Arizona explores early memory-monitoring, or metacognitive, skills in preschool children, adapting paradigms from work with rhesus monkeys to eludicate a better understanding of the ontongeny of memory-monitoring skills.
Links:
SILC website: http://spatiallearning.org/.
Temple University Infant Lab: http://www.temple.edu/infantlab/
University of Arizona Language Development Lab: http://web.arizona.edu/~tweety/index.html