On September 24, 2018, Dr. Karl K. Szpunar will be at ISU delivering a lecture entitled “The Psychology of Future Thinking: From Personal to Collective Cognition.” His lecture will be held in Physics 0039 at 12:10 pm.
Dr. Szpunar’s research program uses novel behavioral and neuroimaging techniques to identify adaptive uses on memory in future-oriented cognition and education. His research on future thinking aims to elucidate mechanisms that give rise to prospective cognitions about the personal and collective future. His educational research is focused on developing interventions that can reduce inattentive mind wandering and optimize learning from extended study sequences such as classroom lectures.
Dr. Szpunar received his doctoral degree from Washington University and completed two post-doctoral fellowships, one at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and another at Harvard University. Currently, he holds the position of assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Szpunar’s work is widely cited and has had a major impact in the scientific literatures on future thinking and applying cognitive research to educational practice. He is the recipient of the Rising Star honor from the Association for Psychological Science in 2012 and the Early Career Award from the Psychonomic Society in 2018.