Forensic and Clinical Cognition Lab

Dr Melanie Takarangi

In my lab we marry cognitive and clinical psychology. Using an experimental approach, we study the ways that memories—particularly what and how people remember about adverse personal experiences and their reactions to those experiences—shape resilience in the present and in the future.

We are interested in factors—including warnings, stress, attention, and social connection—that shape the way we attend to, react to and remember emotional material and experiences, and how we anticipate emotional experiences in the future. We also examine the role of involuntary or spontaneous remembering and related concepts, including mind-wandering and meta-awareness, in determining psychological well-being. And finally, we work to understand other puzzles of memory in legal contexts, such as memory distortion for crime, and how alcohol affects eyewitness memory.

The Forensic and Clinical Cognition Lab is a part of the College of Education, Psychology, and Social Work at Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia.