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Department of Psychological Sciences

Alexandria Zakrzewski

Alexandria ZakrzewskiContact Information

Office: BH 423

E-mail: aczakrzewski@ksu.edu

Vita (PDF)

Google Scholars Page

Auditory Learning & Cognition Lab

Research Interests

My research seeks to understand the capacity of higher-level human cognition. In the past, I have explored evolutionary origins by testing cognitive abilities in rhesus macaques in two domains: (1) metacognition (“cognition about cognition”) using the uncertainty-monitoring paradigm, (2) explicit categorization in the context of multiple-system theory of categorization. Currently, I am focused on how individuals’ metacognitive judgments (e.g., confidence) predict performance accuracy during psychophysical discrimination and memory tasks as well as exploring neural correlates of confidence using electroencephalography (EEG). This work has important implications for higher-level cognition across species because it could address concerns that stimulus-response associations drive non-human metacognition.

My research questions include:

-What are the limits of humans’ metacognitive accuracy? (E.g., can it generalize across stimuli, tasks, and domains? Or, is metacognition task specific?)

-How does aging affect metacognition?

-How does metacognition change with perceptual learning and training?

-How might event-related potentials (ERPs) and time-frequency analyses of EEG data be used to relate internal processes to metacognitive judgments, such as confidence?

Representative Publications (for full publication list, see CV)

Zakrzewski, A. C., Maniscalco, B., & Wisniewski, M. G. (2023) Late ERP correlates of confidence for auditory categorization of complex sounds. Neuroscience Letters, 137294.
 

Wisniewski, M. G., Zakrzewski, A. C., Bell, D. R., & Wheeler, M. (2021). EEG power spectral dynamics associated with listening in adverse conditions. Psychophysiology, 58(9), e13877. doi: 10.1111/psyp.13877 

Zakrzewski, A. C., Sanders, E. C., & Berry, J. M. (2021). Evidence for age-equivalent and task-dissociative metacognition in the memory domain. Frontiers in psychology, 12, 630143. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.630143 

Zakrzewski, A. C., Wisniewski, M. G., Williams, H. L., & Berry, J. M. (2019). Artificial neural networks reveal individual differences in metacognitive monitoring of memory. PloS one, 14(7), e0220526. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0220526 

Zakrzewski, A. C., Wisniewski, M. G., Iyer, N., & Simpson, B. D. (2019). Confidence tracks sensory-and decision-related ERP dynamics during auditory detection. Brain and Cognition, 129, 49-58. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2018.10.007