Jill Shelton has taught at UTC since 2013, returning to the place where she earned her undergraduate and master’s degrees. Photo by Angela Foster.
At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, research takes many forms. For UC Foundation Professor Jill Shelton, it’s a way to answer questions.
As the director of the Cognitive Aging, Learning and Memory (CALM) LAB, Shelton is dedicated to advancing psychological research. The lab focuses on individual differences in cognitive and motivational factors, utilizing behavioral and eye-tracking techniques.
Among her research interests are prospective memory, individual differences in working memory and intelligence, cognitive aging in healthy adults and adults with dementia, applying cognitive principles to educational settings, the distracting effects of cell phones and consumer decision-making processes.
Earning her bachelor’s and master’s in psychology from UTC, Shelton has a passion for students on campus and is the psychological science master’s degree program director.
In addition to her work on campus, she has served as the president of the Southern Society of Philosophy and Psychology and is currently a member of the Psychonomic Society Governing Board.
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When did you first become interested in psychology?
“I originally was a secondary education and English major, and I guess I always knew at some level I wanted to be in an educational setting for my career. I learned that while I was fascinated by the literary works—I was reading and analyzing why they wrote what they did—I realized that I wanted to go beyond that and actually evaluate people in their natural contexts.
“I switched my major to psychology in my senior year to be a counselor or clinical psychologist, like many psychology majors. I was taking a cognitive psychology class and volunteering at an adolescent psychiatric ward. I realized that being in a clinical setting was not what I wanted to do in my everyday life. I was much more interested in what I was learning in that human cognition class than in being in a clinic.
“I went to my cognitive psychology professor in a bit of an existential crisis, as I had just switched majors, and now I didn’t want to be a counselor. I said, ‘What do I do? I want to help and support people.’ He said, ‘What do you think I do on a daily basis as a teacher and a scientist?’ It was a light bulb moment. He invited me to work in his lab. He studied false memory and my passion grew from there.”
Is research your passion?
“What makes research fun is that it’s something you’re passionate about. In a research question, you’re finding the answers to research that is challenging. You really need to have that passion and enthusiasm about the topic to make it realistic to see it to fruition.
“My research program has evolved. My lab is called the Cognitive Aging, Learning and Memory Lab. I came in from a postdoctoral experience at an Alzheimer’s disease research center, where I did a lot of work in that area. I started out doing a lot of lab-based experiments, looking at how individuals across the adult lifespan performed on different cognitive tasks.
“Over time, I’ve felt that those approaches are really good for maybe isolating some cognitive processes that are important in our everyday functioning. It’s not really translating to everyday life. That has led me to transition into more naturalistic, applied research contexts.”
Why are you specifically interested in cognitive psychology?
“Cognitive psychology is really the study of how people think, how we perceive the world around us, how we remember and how we make decisions. I think that’s an inherent part of being human, how we think. It’s a tough problem to tackle because obviously, you have to be creative in getting objective evidence of what’s going on in people’s heads.
“So to me, it was a challenge to go down that route. I’m just genuinely interested in why people do what they do, how they perceive the world around them and how that influences the decisions they make. I’ve gotten really interested in goal achievement, and I think that’s the educator in me who really wants to help students be successful. If you can apply what we know about human cognition to the academic setting, you can really help students achieve positive learning outcomes.”
For students interested in your research, how would you encourage them to pursue that path?
“I would tell them to get involved in activities in their department. For example, become a research assistant or a teaching assistant. In the psychology department here, we developed a teaching assistant class, which is something I developed when I first came here. Students actually get to be teaching assistants in the classroom, work closely with faculty and take coursework that teaches them the scholarship of teaching.
“All of that helps people to be more competitive for graduate programs. We have the same for research assistants. Our students have to fill out an application to become a teaching or research assistant. That’s real, hands-on experience. We call it the doing psychology component of our curriculum. There are also opportunities to work and do internships at psychiatric or aging facilities. By getting that hands-on experience, not only are you making yourself more competitive for the next stage, but you’re engaging in some exploration about what you like and what you don’t like.”
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Cognitive Aging, Learning and Memory (CALM) LAB
