Department of Psychology faculty Drs. Nancy Gee and Joseph McFall will give separate presentations at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Brown Bag lecture series on Wednesday, Dec. 7, at noon in Williams Center Room S204.
“Detours on the Information Highway” is the theme of the monthly lecture series, now in its 11th year. The informal talks are held on the first Wednesday of each month and are free and open to the public.
In her talk, “How Animals Affect Us: From Childhood to Old Age,” Dr. Gee will reflect on her recent two-year experience at WALTAM, a global research hub of Mars Petcare, located in Leicestershire, England. Gee completely immersed herself into research on the impact of companion animals on human health and well-being over the lifespan. She will briefly summarize the known effects of companion animals on children and older adults.
As the Human-Animal Interaction Research Manager for WALTHAM, Gee manages an international portfolio of human-animal interaction collaborations from her academic position. Her own program of research has focused primarily on the impact of dogs on aspects of human cognition, in children, including working memory, and executive functioning and physiological responses such as heart rate variability to the presence or contact with dogs.
In “Generation Differences in Collaborative Everyday Problem Solving,” Dr. McFall will address obstacles to goals that are encountered in everyday life, regardless of age. “These ‘everyday’ problems are sometimes individual problems that we solve by ourselves; however, the majority of everyday life problem solving is social,” he said.
“We tell others about our problems, receive advice, and sometimes involve the aid of others in solving our problems. Sometimes, we even share the same problem with a coworker, friend, or loved one and must manage the social processes involved in collaboration,” McFall explained.
The types of problems that are encountered, approaches undertaken to solve them and levels of success may vary from younger to older adulthood stages, McFall said. Before they can compare generational differences in problem solving, researchers must overcome a serious research design flaw in examining the success (or failure) of collaboration: the social processes involved in working with someone else are confounded with the number of unique persons contributing to solutions.
“We crafted a novel approach which allows us to tease apart this confound and explore the effects of collaboration in World War II and Post-War cohorts vs. Millennials,” McFall said.
A recipient of multiple grants and awards, member of several journal editorial advisory boards and reviewer of human-animal interaction research grant proposals, Gee has contributed chapters to human-animal interaction volumes and served as co-editor for the volume, “The Social Neuroscience of HAI,” published this year by the American Psychological Association. More recently, Gee acted as lead editor of “How Animals Help Students Learn: Research and Practice for Educators and Mental-Health Professionals,” soon to be published by Taylor & Francis, Routledge Press.
Gee frequently presents at national and international human-animal interaction conferences, and serves on the Human-Animal Bond Advisory Board for Pet Partners and the Board of the International Society for Anthrozoology.
McFall’s teaching and research interests center on cognitive development. He earned his bachelor's degree in Sociology (concentration in Anthropology) and Psychology at Fredonia and a doctoral degree in Life-Span Developmental Psychology at West Virginia University. He taught at Syracuse University before returning to Fredonia.
McFall studies normative and non-normative everyday cognition in early and later adulthood, such as decision making models, problem-solving effectiveness and reasoning biases. He is also interested in the roles of mild and moderate cognitive impairment in applied cognition. McFall hopes to help improve early detection of dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease, by assisting caregivers in noticing patterns of atypical cognition amidst the extraordinary variability of cognitive changes during mid- to later adulthood.
