Dr. Jennifer Talarico (she/her) is a Professor at Lafayette College, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She specializes in research on memory for personal events and how emotion affects learning. She earned her Ph.D. from Duke University in 2006.

Dr. Talarico’s research examines how social, emotional, and cognitive factors shape how and what we remember from personally-experienced events (flashbulb and autobiographical memories). She studies how memories for emotional events are similar to and different from non-emotional events. For example, her research has shown that memories for hearing about the September 11th terrorist attacks are no more accurate than everyday memories, even though people think that they are.

Dr. Talarico has been featured in The Academic Minute and NBC News, and she writes articles in the popular press, including The Conversation. She teaches courses on how we know what we know in psychology (e.g., research design and statistical analysis), what we know in cognitive psychology (e.g., attention, memory, and decision-making), and how we can apply what we know as psychologists to how we live as individuals in the world (e.g., using the science of learning to become better students).

Recommended research publication: Talarico, J. M. (2009). Freshman flashbulbs: Memories of unique and first-time events in starting college. Memory, 17(3), 256-265.