Steven Smith
  • Professor
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Research Areas
  • Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience

Biography

Office Hours: Tuesdays & Thursdays 2:00-4:00 (virtual)

Accepting Students for 2025-2026?: No

Research Interests

  • Creative Cognition — Fixation & Mental Blocks, Incubation, Insight, Creative Idea Generation, Design Fixation
  • Memory — Context-Dependent Memory, Retrieval Blocking & Recovery
  • Metacognition — Aha! Moments, Automatic & Recollective Processes in Metamemory, Tip-Of-the-Tongue (TOT) States

Selected Publications

    • Smith, S. M., Kidd, M. A., Chandolia, V. J., and Hermoso, J. M. (in press). Verbal Insight Problems and Aha! Moments. Creativity Research Journal. DOI: 10.1080/10400419.2025.2547971.

    • Salvi, C., Wiley, J., & Smith, S. M. (Eds.) (2024). The Emergence of Insight. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    • Smith, S. M. & Beda, Z. (2024). The past and future of research on so-called ‘incubation’ effects. In Salvi, Wiley, & Smith (Eds.) The Emergence of Insight, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 13-38.

    • Smith, S. M., & Beda, Z. (2023). Unconscious work doesn’t work. Creativity Research Journal, Vol 35(3), pp. 369-379. DOI: 10.1080/10400419.2023.2189358

    • Beda, Z., & Smith, S. M. (2022). Unfixate your creative mind: Forgetting fixation and its applications. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 8(1), pp. 66-78. DOI: 10.1037/tps0000290

    • Smith, S. M., and Beda, Z. (2020). Old problems in new contexts: The context dependent fixation hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(1), 192–197. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000615

    • Smith, S. M., and Beda, Z. (2020). Forgetting fixation with context change. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.

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