Expertise

Cognition, Development, Spatial, Memory

Biography

Nora S. Newcombe, Ph.D. , is a Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology  at Temple University. Dr. Newcombe was educated at Antioch College,  where she graduated with a major in psychology in 1972 and at Harvard  University, where she received her Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Relations in 1976. She taught previously at Penn State University. Dr. Newcombe currently serves as President of the International Mind Brain Education Society (IMBES), as Past President of the Federation of  Associations in Brain and Behavioral Sciences (FABBS), as Editor of Psychological Science in the Public Interest and as Associate Editor of Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. Honors include the Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from the  Society for Research in Child Development, the William James Fellow Award from APS, the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the George Miller Award and the G. Stanley  Hall Awards from APA, the Award for Distinguished Service to  Psychological Science, also from APA, and the Women in Cognitive Science Mentor Award.

She is a fellow of four divisions of the American  Psychological Association (General, Experimental, Developmental, and  Psychology of Women), of the Association for Psychological Science, and  of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has been  a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, the  Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and the University of Otago. She is a  member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of  Experimental Psychologists. She served as the PI of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) from 2006-2018, headquartered at Temple and involving Northwestern, the University of Chicago and the  University of Pennsylvania as primary partners.

Curriculum Vitae

Website

Selected Publications

  • Begolli, K., Booth, J., Holmes, C. & Newcombe, N.S. (2020). How many apples make a quarter? The challenge of discrete proportional formats. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 191, Article 104774. 
  • Green, C.S. & Newcombe, N.S. (2020). Cognitive training: How evidence, controversies, and challenges inform education policy. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7, 80- 86.
  • Ngo, C.T., Horner, A., Newcombe, N.S. & Olson, I.R. (2019). Development of holistic episodic recollection. Psychological Science, 30, 1696-1706. 
  • Nazareth, A., Huang, X., Voyer, D. & Newcombe, N.S. (2019). A meta-analysis of sex differences in human navigation skills. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26, 1503-1528.
  • Canada, K., Ngo, C.T., Newcombe, N.S., Geng, F., & Riggins, T. (2019). It’s all in the details: Relations between young children’s developing pattern separation abilities and hippocampal subfieldvolumes. Cerebral Cortex, 29, 3427-3433. 
  • Ngo, C.T., Newcombe, N.S. & Olson, I.R. (2019). Gain-loss framing enhances mnemonic discrimination in preschoolers. Child Development, 90, 1569-1778. 
  • Ngo, C.T., Lin, Y., Newcombe, N.S. & Olson, I.R. (2019). Building up and wearing down episodic memory: Mnemonic discrimination and relational binding. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148, 1463-1479.
  • Nazareth, A., Newcombe, N.S., Shipley, T.F., Velazquez, M. & Weisberg, S.M. (2019). Beyond small-scale spatial skills: Navigation skills and geoscience education. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 4,  doi:10.1186/s41235-019-0167-2
  • Weisberg, S.M., Newcombe, N.S. & Chatterjee, A. (2019). Everyday taxi drivers: Do better navigators have larger hippocampi? Cortex, 115, 280-293.
  • Newcombe, N.S. (2019). Navigation and the developing brain. Journal of Experimental Biology, 222: jeb186460. 
  • Verdine, B.N., Zimmerman, L., Foster, L., Marzouk, M.A., Golinkoff, R.M. Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Newcombe, N.S. (2019). Effects of geometric toy design on parent-child interactions and spatial language. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 46, 126-141.

Courses Taught

  • Introductory Psychology
  • Capstone Classes
  • Graduate Seminars