UW–Madison’s Haley Vlach will be featured on PBS Wisconsin this month, speaking about “Why Forgetting Helps Us Remember.”
Vlach is an associate professor in the School of Education’s Department of Educational Psychology, and the director of UW–Madison’s Learning, Cognition, and Development Lab.
The episode in which Vlach appears is part of a PBS series, “Wednesday Nights @ the Lab,” hosted by Tom Zinnen, an outreach manager at the UW–Madison Biotechnology Center. In the episode, Vlach explores humans’ learning process and explains that allowing some time to forget between learning and recalling information can help us to remember better in the long run.
Vlach’s research examines the mechanisms underlying children’s learning in order to understand cognition and how cognition develops, and build an empirical base for the design of successful educational and health interventions.
Her work spans the following cognitive and developmental processes: memory, memory development, word and category learning, concept learning, conceptual development, inductive learning, and generalization/transfer of learning. A central focus is connecting more traditional psychological research to applied settings, such as the design of cognitive interventions and concept learning in the classroom.
The episode will be broadcast throughout the month, beginning Monday, Dec. 6. It is also available for viewing online at pbswisconsin.org.