Positions
Education
Teaching Areas
Undergraduate Programs
- Psychology
Graduate Supervision
Accepting Students for Supervision
Guidelines or Expectations for Prospective Students
Willingness to learn procedures for assessing the hearing and psychological skills of younger and older adults. Some experience with statistical analysis software.
Supervised Theses / Projects
- Priming and Visual Processing Under Binocular Suppression: Investigating the Effects of Delay on Implicit Memory for Fully and Partially Processed
- Information in Younger Adults
- Distractibility of Speech Spoken in Emotional Tones in Younger Adults.
- Implicit Memory for Unattended Background Information Appears Different in Two Different Tasks
- The Effects of Time Delay on Auditory Integration in Older and Younger Adults.
- Assessing age-related differences in auditory integration of spectrally filtered sentences: The effects of temporal delay between the presentation of the spectral information in each ear.
Research
Research Interests
- How age influences the ability to focus on relevant information and ignore irrelevant information.
- Using implicit memory to assess the effects of age on inhibitory functioning
- Effects of aging and hearing loss on speech understanding.
- Age related changes in cognitive function and how they may influence speech and language processing.
- The unintentional processing of emotional signals from unattended information in younger and older adults.
Current Research Projects / Labs
- Implicit memory for unattended information as assessed using Binocular Suppression in younger and older adults. In this study, younger and older participants complete a binocular suppression task. On each trial of the task, participants identify a target word (the word inside a box) while ignoring another word. Then, in the second phase of the trial, participants will identify a target word that gradually appears in one eye, while a masking stimulus (visual white noise) is presented in the other eye at full intensity at the beginning of the task. In both phases of the task, participants report the target word as quickly and as accurately as possible. We are measuring the time required for the gradually appearing word in the 2nd phase of each trial to break from the binocular suppression created by the full intensity masker presented in the one eye appearing at the beginning of the trial. This study is designed to determine if there is implicit memory for the words presented and if this implicit memory will change how quickly words break free from binocular suppression.
- Comparing implicit memory for words using the binocular suppression and word fragment completion. In this research, participants will be completing both a binocular suppression task as well as a fragment completion task to determine how implicit memory for words influences performance in these tasks. We will be testing both younger and older participants in order to assess the influence of normal aging on implicit memory for fully attended and ignored words.
Collaborations / Affiliations
My laboratory is the Northern Centre for Research on Aging and Communication at Nipissing University.
Open to Media Inquiries
Publications
Murphy, D., McDowd, J., & Wilcox, K. (1999). Inhibition and aging: Similarities between younger and older adults as revealed by the processing of unattended auditory information. Psych. and Aging, 14, 44-59.
Guerreiro, M. J. S., Murphy, D., & Van Gerven, P. W. M. (2010). The Role of Sensory Modality in Age-Related Distraction: A Critical Review and a Renewed View. Psych Bulletin, 136, 975-1022.;
Van Gerven, P., & Murphy, D. (2010). Aging and Distraction by Irrelevant Speech: Does Emotional Valence Matter? J of Geron.: Psych Science, 65B, 667-670.;
Albert, G., Pearson, M. Arnocky, S. Wachowiak, M. Nicol, J. R., Murphy, D. R. (2018). Effects of Masculinized and Feminized Male Voices on Men and Women's Distractibility and Implicit Memory. J of Ind. Diffs.39(3): 151-165.
Murphy, D, Bailey, H, Pearson, M, and Albert, G. (2018). The Irrelevant Speech Effect Among Younger and Older Adults: The Influence of Background Noises on Reading Comprehension. Exp. Aging Res. 44(2): 162-178.