Rate My Professor Megan Papesh

Megan Papesh earned a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Baldwin-Wallace College in 2005. She completed a Master of Arts in Psychology at Arizona State University in 2008 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Arizona State University in 2012. Her academic career includes positions as Assistant Professor at New Mexico State University and Associate Professor at Louisiana State University before her current role as Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Psychology Department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she also serves as Psychology Ph.D. Program Co-coordinator.

Papesh's research focuses on episodic memory, visual search, unfamiliar face perception and recognition, attentional fields, eye-tracking, and pupillometry. She investigates basic and applied questions in human attention, perception, and memory, including motivational and social factors in face recognition, the influence of task difficulty on incidental memory, and the impact of statistical contexts on visual attention in applied settings such as cancer detection. Selected publications include the 2024 book Modern Pupillometry: Cognition, Neuroscience, and Practical Applications co-edited with Stephen D. Goldinger, papers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on hippocampal memory signals, and articles in journals such as Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, Attention Perception & Psychophysics, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. She received the Association for Psychological Science Rising Star award in 2016 and multiple teaching awards. Her work has contributed to understanding memory formation, retrieval dynamics, and expertise in visual tasks, with her publications cited thousands of times.