People and Research

I am interested in the structure of mental representation, the process of forming mental representations, and the relationship of both to psychological distance. My research shows that we spontaneously represent distal (vs. proximal) others more in terms of their dispositional traits which capture the gist or essence of person-representations. Current research questions include the following: 1) how does distance and level of construal affect the encoding of gist vs. verbatim memories? 2) does distance/construal level affect the role of causality in representation? 3) how do different dimensions of construal relate to one another?