Research
This is a brand new website, and soon there will be links to lab webpages and photos of past lab members. While you wait you can always visit the classic site at https://www.gehringlab.org.
Stay tuned!
Error Detection in the Brain.
If you’ve ever said “oops!” you’ve experienced your brain detecting its own mistakes. What you may not know is that your brain, at just the moment you are making that error, is producing a pulse of electrical activity known as the Error-Related Negativity (ERN). I was one of the researchers who originally discovered the ERN, which is electrical activity known as an event-related potential that is recorded in numerous cognitive tasks. One of my goals as a researcher for over 30 years has been to understand what your brain is trying to accomplish when it produces an ERN. My original report is one of the most-cited articles ever in the journal Psychological Science. I’ve also been interested in why certain kinds of mental illness are associated with unusually large or small ERNs. My laboratory at Michigan made the initial discovery that individuals with OCD show exaggerated ERN activity compared to healthy controls, which has spawned a large research literature on anxiety and the ERN. Since then, I have collaborated with colleagues in the Department of Psychiatry on a research program using the ERN to understand the development of pediatric psychopathology, including OCD, ADHD, and autism. In a second line of research, I have collaborated with developmental psychologists to use the ERN to understand how elementary school affects brain activity and executive function in children transitioning from pre-school to kindergarten.
You can read all about the ERN in this (long!) book chapter (PDF): Gehring, W. J., Liu, Y., Orr, J. M., & Carp, J. (2012). The error-related negativity (ERN/Ne). In S. J. Luck, & E. Kappenman (eds.), Oxford handbook of event-related potential components (pp. 231-291). New York: Oxford University Press.
My collaborators and I wrote a retrospective piece on how our ERN research got started back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s: Gehring, W. J., Goss, B., Coles, M. G. H., Meyer, D. E., & Donchin, E. (2018). The error-related negativity. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(2), 200-204.
You can find a list of publications on Bill Gehring’s Google Scholar page and a list and links to PDFs are in my CV. (links coming soon!)
Higher Education Research.
As a psychology professor teaching hundreds of students every year, I noticed that many students felt like they were not accomplishing their academic goals. One reason for this is that many students adopt strategies for studying and learning that do not work very well, and they also become distracted by social media and technology. Those observations led to my class Cognitive Science of Academic Success, which I discuss in my section on teaching. In a project with my colleague Dr. Shelly Schreier, we surveyed several thousand Introductory Psychology students to identify study habits that helped them succeed in class, and we gave students feedback on how to improve.
Just as important as student’s individual approaches to success are the things a university does to help its students succeed, especially when those students arrive at college with less academic preparation than their peers. Several years ago I began a line of research using institutional administrative data to understand the factors that contribute to undergraduate academic success, especially for students from under-resourced academic backgrounds. This project, in collaboration with Amazon economist Dr. Julian Hsu, examines how the math placement recommendation (whether to take pre-calculus before taking calculus) affects course and major choices. We find that, especially for women, the recommendation to take pre-calculus can lead students to take more quantitative coursework and graduate at a higher rate in STEM majors, suggesting a benefit to the additional preparation from pre-calculus.