Caroline Palmer
Professor and Tier 1 CRC
Department of Psychology
McGill University
Stewart Biological Sciences Bldg., 1205 Dr Penfield Avenue #N7/18b
tel: 514-398-6128
e-mail: caroline.palmer(at)mcgill.ca
Membership Status
Principal Member
Research Themes
Neural Bases of Language
Speech Science Modeling
Areas of Expertise
Production of music and speech, memory and motor control, skilled performancee
Current Research Interests
Current Research interests: My research program combines two related issues in cognitive psychology: how people remember long sequences typical of speech and music, and how they produce those sequences. Many theories of memory for speech, written language, pictures, and other human endeavors focus on the problem of serial order: knowing what comes next in a sequence. What most theories do not address is the time course of retrieval: when particular sequential (serial order) information is available, and for how long. My research focuses on the time course of serial order in music and speech. One theme of my research addresses the range or scope of planning in sequence production; the range of planning, similar to memory span measures that gauge short-term memory capacity, refers to the span of sequence items that are accessible at a given time during performance. A second theme addresses skill acquisition in music performance. A third theme extends our memory findings to understanding how people perceive stable, categorical events in a continuously changing world. These lines of work indicate that temporal structure is fundamental to understanding how people perceive meaningful units in a continuously varying auditory world.
Selected Publications
- Highben, Z., & Palmer, C. (2004). Effects of auditory and motor mental practice in memorized piano performance. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 159, 58-65.
- Palmer, C., & Pfordresher, P.Q. (2003). Incremental planning in sequence production. Psychological Review, 110 , 683-712.
- Finney, S.A. & Palmer, C. (2003). Auditory feedback and memory for music performance: Sound evidence for an encoding effect. Memory & Cognition, 31, 51-64.
Graduate Students
- Sean Hutchins (PhD candidate)
- Zachary Schendel (PhD candidate, OSU)
- Timothy Walker (postdoctoral fellow, OSU)
- Janeen Loehr (MSC candidate)
