Cyma Kathryn Van Petten is an American cognitive neuroscientist known for electrophysiological studies of language, memory, and cognition. She is Professor of Psychology at the

State University of New York at Binghamton The State University of New York at Binghamton (Binghamton University or SUNY Binghamton) is a public research university in Greater Binghamton, New York, United States. It is one of the four university centers in the State University of New Y ...

where she directs the Event-Related Potential Lab. Van Petten was recipient of the Early Career Award from the

Society for Psychophysiological Research The Society for Psychophysiological Research is an international scientific organization with over 800 members worldwide. The society is composed of scientists whose research is focused on the study of the interrelationships between the physiologica ...

in 1994.

Biography

Van Petten received a

B.A. A Bachelor of Arts (abbreviated B.A., BA, A.B. or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is the holder of a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the liberal arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree ...

in Psychology with honors at

Reed College Reed College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland, Portland, Oregon, E ...

in 1981. As an undergraduate, she engaged in research on pain sensitivity. After graduating, she worked as a research assistant with Martha Neuringer at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, where she studied effects of dietary

omega-3 fatty acid Omega−3 fatty acids, also called omega−3 oils, ω−3 fatty acids or ''n''−3 fatty acids, are polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) characterized by the presence of a double bond three atoms away from the terminal methyl group in their ...

deficiency on vision. Van Petten attended graduate school at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

(UCSD) and obtained a Ph.D in Neurosciences in 1989 under the supervision of Marta Kutas. With Kutas, Van Petten did pioneering work in

neurolinguistics Neurolinguistics is the study of Nervous system, neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fie ...

. One of their first works examined neural responses to ambiguous words (e.g., bank) in a semantic priming task. Their collaborative focused on specific evoked response potentials such as the N400 that are differentially responsive to word frequency. Van Petten remained at UCSD as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science, where she collaborated with

Seana Coulson Seana Coulson is a cognitive scientist known for her research on the neurobiology of language and studies of how meaning is constructed in human language, including experimental pragmatics, concepts, semantics, and metaphors. She is a professor i ...

on ERP studies of conceptual/

semantic integration Semantic integration is the process of interrelating information from diverse sources, for example calendars and to do lists, email archives, presence information (physical, psychological, and social), documents of all sorts, contacts (including ...

and metaphor comprehension. Van Petten became a faculty member in the Psychology Department at the

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona, United States. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it ...

in 1991, and remained there until moving to

Binghamton University The State University of New York at Binghamton (Binghamton University or SUNY Binghamton) is a public university, public research university in Binghamton metropolitan area, Greater Binghamton, New York, United States. It is one of the four uni ...

in 2008. Much of her work has focused on source memory (i.e., recall of when or where something was learned), its underlying neural mechanisms, and the impact of aging on source versus item memory. Van Petten's research program has been funded by grants from the

National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) is a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). It conducts and funds research on brain and nervous system disorders and has a budget of just over US$2.03 billion. The ...

, the

National Institute on Aging The National Institute on Aging (NIA) is a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), located in Bethesda, Maryland. The NIA itself is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. The NIA leads a broad scientific effort to understand ...

, and the

National Institute of Mental Health The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH, in turn, is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is the primar ...

Representative Publications

* Folstein, J. R., & Van Petten, C. (2008). Influence of cognitive control and mismatch on the N2 component of the ERP: A review. ''Psychophysiology'', ''45''(1), 152–170. * Van Petten, C. (2004). Relationship between hippocampal volume and memory ability in healthy individuals across the lifespan: Review and meta-analysis. ''Neuropsychologia'', ''42''(10), 1394–1413. *Van Petten, C., & Luka, B. J. (2006). Neural localization of semantic context effects in electromagnetic and hemodynamic studies. ''Brain and language'', ''97''(3), 279–293. * Van Petten, C., & Kutas, M. (1990). Interactions between sentence context and word frequency in event-related brain potentials. ''Memory & Cognition'', ''18''(4), 380–393. * Van Petten, C., Kutas, M., Kluender, R., Mitchiner, M., & McIsaac, H. (1991). Fractionating the word repetition effect with event-related potentials. ''Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience'', ''3''(2), 131–150. *Van Petten, C., & Senkfor, A. J. (1996). Memory for words and novel visual patterns: Repetition, recognition, and encoding effects in the event‐related brain potential. ''Psychophysiology'', ''33''(5), 491–506.

References

External links

Faculty page
�
Event-Related Potential Lab

Google Scholar
{{DEFAULTSORT:Van Petten, Cyma Living people American women psychologists American cognitive psychologists Binghamton University faculty Reed College alumni University of California, San Diego alumni Year of birth missing (living people) American women academics 21st-century American women 21st-century American psychologists