Office Address: 406 Gilmer Hall
Office Hours: Email for an appointment
Lab Website: Dodson Cognitive Lab

Biography

Our research focuses on memory with an emphasis on the occurrence of (a) false memories, (b) overconfidence in one’s memories and (c) changes in memory across the lifespan.  For example, we have been examining factors that contribute to eyewitness identification errors, particularly those that are made with high confidence.  Although growing research suggests that high confidence eyewitness identifications are generally reliable, we have focused on three factors that are systematically related to high confidence misidentifications:  (1) face recognition ability; (2) decision-time and (3) how eyewitnesses justify their identification of a face.

Publications

See our website (faculty.virginia.edu/dodson) for more information and here are some representative publications:

• Dobolyi, D. G. & Dodson, C. S. (2018).  Actual vs. perceived eyewitness accuracy and confidence and the featural justification effect.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 24, 543-563.
• Dodson, C.S. (2017) Aging and Memory. In: Wixted, J.T. (ed.), Cognitive Psychology of Memory, Vol. 2 of Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference, 2nd edition, Byrne, J.H. (ed.). pp. 403–421. Oxford: Academic Press. 
• Gettleman, J.N., Grabman, J.H., Dobolyi, D.G. & Dodson, C.S. (2020).  Why eyewitness confidence is predictive of accuracy for good (but not poor) face recognizers under suboptimal exposure and delay conditions.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.
• Grabman, J.H., Dobolyi, D. G., Berelovich, N.L & Dodson, C.S. (2019).  Predicting High Confidence Errors in Eyewitness Memory: The Role of Face Recognition Ability, Decision-time, and Justifications.  Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 8, 233-243.