Elizabeth Ligon Bjork
moattari
Professor
Ph.D.: University of Michigan
Primary Area: Cognitive Psychology
Address: 7522 Pritzker Hall
Phone: (310) 825-6935
Email: elbjork@psych.ucla.edu
Research and Teaching Interests:
Biosketch & Research Overview: Elizabeth Ligon Bjork (PhD, Psychology, University of Michigan; BA, Mathematics, University of Florida) is Professor of Psychology and Senior Vice Chair in the Psychology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she has also chaired UCLA’s Academic Senate and received UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Her main area of research has been the study of human memory, in particular, the role that inhibitory processes—such as those underlying goal-directed forgetting and memory updating—play in creating an adaptive human memory system. A focus of her recent research, supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, has been the study of how principles of learning discovered in the laboratory can be applied to enhance instructional practices and self-directed learning. One theme of this research is how best to use “desirable difficulties”—such as testing, particularly multiple-choice testing—to enhance not only the learning of the explicitly tested information but also of related information, and additionally, how to use testing to potentiate the initial study and learning of both these types of information. She is an elected member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and has served on Editorial Boards and Review Panels for NIMH. Most recently, with Robert A. Bjork, she is a joint recipient of the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award, given by the Association for Psychological Science in recognition of a lifetime of outstanding contributions in research addressing a critical problem in society at large.
Curriculum Vitae
Publications
Elizabeth Ligon Bjork's Lab Site