Rate My Professor Mareike Wieth

Mareike Wieth is Chair and Professor of Psychological Science and Director of the Neuroscience Concentration at Albion College, where she has served on the faculty since 2005, beginning in a visiting position that led to tenure. She earned her B.A. from Kenyon College in 1999 and her M.A. in 2001 and Ph.D. in psychology in 2005 from Michigan State University. Trained as a cognitive psychologist, Wieth's research explores how individual differences affect higher-order cognitive processes, including creativity, insight problem-solving, decision-making, and working memory. Her studies have revealed that people often solve creative problems more effectively during their non-optimal time of day, when they are least alert, such as evenings for morning people and mornings for night owls. Additional investigations examine the links between creativity and eating disorders, musicianship and divergent thinking, incentives' effects on problem-solving, multitasking under divided attention, and personality traits mediating time-of-day preferences with behaviors like eating.

Wieth's key publications include 'Incentives Improve Performance on Both Incremental and Insight Problem Solving' (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2006, with B.D. Burns), 'Time of Day Effects on Problem Solving: When the Non-Optimal is Optimal' (Thinking & Reasoning, 2011, with R.T. Zacks), 'When Higher Working Memory Capacity Hinders Insight' (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2016, with M.S. DeCaro and C.A. Van Stockum Jr.), 'An Exploratory Study of Creativity and Eating Disorders' (Journal of Eating Disorders, 2017, with B.D. Burns, Y. Zhang, and S. Touyz), and 'Conflicts and Consistencies in Creativity Research and Teaching' (Teaching of Psychology, 2018, with A.P. Francis). She was named Albion College's Teacher of the Year for the 2019-2020 academic year and chairs the Institutional Review Board. Wieth has contributed expertise to NPR and BBC broadcasts, with her findings featured in The Atlantic, Psychology Today, Time, The Washington Post, Scientific American, Harvard Business Review, and other media, underscoring her influence in cognitive psychology and creativity research. She actively mentors undergraduate students, involving them in research projects that result in co-authored publications and presentations.