Research Summary from Christina Bejjani

Cognitive control describes how we use our current context to flexibly adjust attention in line with internal goals. The overarching goal of my research is to examine how memory guides cognitive control—namely, how past experiences and internal goals can shape our responses to demands in our environment, particularly those that require a great deal of attention.

My research broadly falls under three main areas:

control-learning attention cognitive control motivation fMRI

Do our past experiences inform how we respond to situations that require a lot of attentional focus? For example, people might approach a new situation with a heightened sense of attention, because similar environments have proven difficult in the past. In order for this mechanism to work, people would need to bind together a specific control state (e.g., heightened focus of attention) and their memory of the attentionally demanding environment. In this line of research, I examine how learned contextual cues guide strategic adjustment to attentional demands, showing that people can generalize cognitive strategies across similar contexts, and which brain regions support this type of control-learning.

Bejjani, C., Zhang, Z.*, and Egner, T. (2018). Control by association: Transfer of implicitly primed attentional states across linked stimuli. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 25(2): 617-626.

Article covered in Psychonomics Featured Content.

Bejjani, C., Tan, S.*, and Egner, T. (2020). Performance feedback promotes proactive but not reactive adaptation of conflict-control. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 46(4), 369-387.

Open access preprint available here.

Bejjani, C. and Egner, T. (2021). Evaluating the learning of stimulus-control associations through incidental memory of reinforcement events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 47(10), 1599–1621.

Open access preprint available here.

Bejjani, C., Hoyle, R.H., and Egner, T. (2022). Distinct but correlated latent factors support the regulation of learned conflict-control and task-switching. Cognitive Psychology, 135, 101474.

Open access preprint available here.

Somasundaram, V.^**, Bejjani, C.**, and Egner, T. (under review at Acta Psychologica). Target-response contingency learning does not modulate cognitive control demands.

Open access preprint available here.

Bejjani, C., Cruz, R. and Egner, T. (in progress). Learning context-sensitive control: A meta-analytic review.

structure learning multitasking cognitive flexibility fMRI TMS

How do people learn about, recognize, and flexibly respond to their environments (i.e., cognitive flexibility)? For example, we might recognize repeated elements in our environments and classify these elements as belonging to categories, reducing the amount of attention we pay to any one particular item. On the other hand, the environment may also present us with a number of unique, unfamiliar elements, consistently requiring our attention so that we can determine their value. In this line of research, I examine how different contexts and contextual information impact cognitive flexibility and the brain regions that support learned cognitive flexibility.

Bejjani, C. and Egner, T. (2019). Spontaneous task structure formation results in a cost to incidental memory of task stimuli. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2833.

Open access preprint available here.

Bejjani, C., Dolgin, J., Zhang, Z.*, and Egner, T. (2020). Disentangling the roles of cue visibility and knowledge in adjusting cognitive control: A preregistered direct replication of the Farooqui and Manly (2015) study. Psychological Science, 31(4), 468-479.

Open access preprint available here.

Bejjani, C.**, Siqi-Liu, A.**, and Egner, T. (2021). Minimal impact of consolidation on learned switch readiness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 47(10), 1622–1637.

Open access preprint available here.

Sali, A.W., Bejjani, C., and Egner, T. (in progress). Learning cognitive flexibility: Neural mechanisms of adaptive switch readiness.
Bejjani, C., Whitehead, P.S., Sali, A.W., Dannhauer, M., Chiu, Y.C., and Egner, T. (preregistration available here). Assessing causal contributions of parietal cortex to learned cognitive flexibility.

individual differences scholarship of teaching and learning psychiatric disorders computational modeling web application

My previous learning and motivation research investigated how people performed on attention and memory tasks during and after various social manipulations. For example, in one study, we examined whether neural responses to learning from negative feedback change if participants believe that intelligence is an innate trait and that they just did poorly on a standardized intelligence test. I am currently applying this psychological research to educational contexts so as to inform current pedagogical practices.

Bejjani, C., DePasque, S., and Tricomi, E. (2019). Intelligence mindset shapes neural learning signals and memory. Biological Psychology, 146, 107715.

Open access preprint available here.
Article covered in Rutgers-Newark featured post.

DiMenichi, B.C., Lempert, K.M., Bejjani, C., and Tricomi, E. (2018). Writing about past failures attenuates cortisol responses and sustained attention deficits following psychosocial stress. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 12: 45.

Article covered in Newsweek, Science Daily, Forbes, The Daily Mail, Moneyish, Mic, New York Post, Neuroscience News, and more.

I also examine whether individual differences play a role in mental health outcomes. Cognitive control is thought to be altered in many psychiatric disorders, but few studies have examined how this ramifies on a large-scale individual difference level.

Bejjani, C., Caspi, A., Moffitt, T. and Egner, T. (in progress). Deficits in learned conflict control are associated with internalizing and thought disorder symptomatology.

If you have any questions about my research, please feel free to contact me. You can view my full list of publications here.