Apresentação Pessoal

Alessandra S. Souza (name in publications) earned her PhD in 2009 at the University of Brasília, Brazil. Between 2010 and 2020, she worked at the University of Zurich investigating human cognitive capacity limitations and ways to bypass them. In September 2020, she started at the University of Porto as Principal Investigator.

Her research focuses on understanding the factors limiting our ability to process information in working memory. Working memory keeps accessible the information we need to think and act purposefully.

In her research, she uses behavioral tasks, eye-tracking, and computational modeling to examine:

(1) how we create, maintain, and manipulate representations in working memory;

(2) why we forget information and whether we can take active measures to prevent the loss of information (e.g., by rehearsing it);

(3) how attention consolidates, strengthens relevant information (through refreshing), or allows us to remove irrelevant information from mind, thereby improving the use of WM capacity; 

(4) the impact of lifelong experiences (such as bilingualism) to cognitive plasticity;

(5) sources of individual differences and developmental trajectories (e.g., healthy aging) for the functioning of cognitive system; and

(6) how verbalizations allow us to bypass cognitive limitations in the processing of visual information.