Madison Fansher

LIFE Fellow since 2021, University of Michigan

I am a doctoral candidate in the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience area at University of Michigan, working with Priti Shah and John Jonides. I graduated from Purdue University in 2018 with a B.S. in Brain and Behavioral Sciences and I am currently an NSF GRFP fellow. I am broadly interested in higher order cognition and applications to education. I aim to study individual differences in willingness to exert cognitive effort as well as the biological processes underlying subjective feelings of pain when engaged in complex cognitive tasks. As such, I am also interested in math anxiety and the development of working memory capacity across the lifespan. In another line of research, I study the cognitive processes underlying scientific reasoning and develop interventions to teach scientific reasoning principles to children and adults.

Selected Publications

Fansher, M., Adkins, T. J., Lewis, R. L., Boduroglu, A., Lalwani, P., Quirk, M., Shah, P., & Jonides, J. (2022). How well do ordinary Americans forecast the growth of COVID-19? Memory & Cognition, 50, 1363–1380. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-022-01288-0

Fansher, M., Adkins, T., & Shah, P. (2022). Graphs do not lead people to infer causation from correlation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 28(2), 314–328. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000393

Fansher, M., Shah, P., & Hélie, S. (2022). The effect of mode of presentation on Tower of Hanoi problem solving. Cognition, 224, Article 105041. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105041